“Yes,” I said. “That is weird.”
“Oh, man,” Kyle said. “If this holds true, this is going to be a huge night.”
But I was more prepared for it to be a long one. The polls in Kentucky close at 6:00 p.m. statewide, but because Kentucky is in two time zones, it’s seven o’clock in Louisville when voting ends in the western counties. With a tray of sandwiches wrapped in plastic on the table, and a bucket of cold drinks at the ready, we all settled in—me, Josh, Kyle, Billy, Stef, John Ashbrook, and Terry. Elaine snuck into the adjoining room to make phone calls, thinking it would likely be a few hours before we knew anything definitive. In 2008, it wasn’t until about 9:30 p.m. that I felt I could trust the results. But at 7:02 p.m., two minutes after the polls closed in Kentucky, before we even had a chance to unwrap the sandwiches, Elaine came rushing back in, in response to the whoops of joy she’d heard from our room.
“What happened?”
“CNN called it,” I said, staring at the television, incredulous. “We won. By a landslide.”
“Already? Are you serious?”
As those around me cheered and high-fived, I stood motionless. I looked at Elaine. “We did it.”
“Oh, Mitch.” She came to hug me, with tears in her eyes. “Thank goodness. Honestly, I was not ready for you to be sitting around the house working on your résumé.” She laughed. “Now let’s get that majority.”
At around 8:30 p.m., after Alison Lundergan Grimes called to concede and we’d watched the results from a few other states, I went downstairs to the ballroom to deliver my victory speech before a rowdy crowd of hundreds. As wonderful as it was to step off the stage, knowing I’d earned the trust of my fellow Kentuckians for another six years (I’d later learn I’d carried 110 of 120 counties), I also knew the night wasn’t over. Afterward, I went back upstairs to watch the final results come in, to see where the Senate stood. Not long after, back in that room, with the announcement of Joni Ernst’s win in Iowa, just before midnight on the night of November 4, at the age of seventy-two, fifty-one years after I first walked into the office of John Sherman Cooper, I became the majority leader of the US Senate.
It was well after midnight when Elaine and I returned home. Neither one of us could sleep. Elaine went upstairs to change, and I took a seat on the sofa in the living room. My ears were ringing with the echo of the ballroom, and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath—the first breath I felt I’d taken in two years. Elaine came downstairs and sat beside me on the couch.
“This reminds me of how you always say that the best moment in a candidate’s campaign is the day before his announcement,” she said. “Because after that, the hard work, and the attacks, begin. Harder days lie ahead but right now, all I want to do is savor this moment.”
I’d been thinking the same thing myself. One race was over but another had just begun. To turn the country around. To restore the Senate. I’d been preparing my whole life.
And I was ready.
Epilogue
Because I’ve flown home to Kentucky nearly every weekend since first being elected senator, I’m usually at least vaguely recognized—Hey, don’t I know that guy from somewhere?—when I’m there. But things were very different on November 6, 2014, two days after my landslide victory over Alison Lundergan Grimes. As soon as I walked into the airport terminal to head back to Washington, crowds started to form around me, snapping photos and taking selfies. People were lined up three and four deep all the way to the gate. When I finally made it to the gangway, I had to laugh. Only in America could a bespectacled polio survivor who started out in this business with no contacts, no credentials, and no money wake up one day at the age of seventy-two to find himself treated like a celebrity.
Although the animal spirits of both the Left and Right had converged in Kentucky in the months leading up to Election Day, even I hadn’t expected this level of attention. But suddenly it was now clear that while I had become a kind of vessel for what many people detested about politics, with this win, I was also an unlikely symbol of its renewal. The editors at Time seemed to be getting at the same thing with the cover of their post-election issue. Superimposed over the infamous red-and-blue Obama “Change” graphic was . . . me. Four months later, the magazine would name me one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Improbable as it was, Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican first elected to the Senate the year Mark Zuckerberg was born, was now pointing the way to the future.
The first thing I did after winning reelection was to hold a press conference at the University of Louisville, outlining what Republicans would do with our newfound majority. Since the moment I assumed the role of Senate majority leader, I have been absolutely determined to restore the Senate. Now more than ever we need the kind of institution that enabled Henry Clay to forge the immensely complicated deals that forestalled the Civil War, and where LBJ teamed up with Republicans like Everett Dirksen and my own role model and former boss, John Sherman Cooper, to pass civil rights legislation that would cement a new social order in ways that a court decision never could.
At its best, the Senate is a place where the divisions and hopes of our big, messy, pluralistic country are channeled and resolved into something resembling consensus, and it’s been my goal to get us there. I believe that consensus among bitterly disputing parties is not only possible but a necessary condition for the tranquil flourishing we aspire to as a people. It is a thing of genius.
I don’t know what some of my more disgruntled colleagues thought the Senate would be like, but perfection is not in its mission statement. This means that if you’re a purist, being a US senator will be utterly exasperating. It also means that if you’re open to something less than perfection, being a US senator can be deeply rewarding. Plenty of others have explained the ways in which the Senate is designed to protect us from ourselves in moments of passion. Far fewer have written about the ways in which that same design, which typically necessitates bipartisan buy-in on major legislation, has helped ensure stability and broad public consensus about our laws. But the latter effect of the Senate’s built-in bias toward supermajorities is just as important as the first, and one I have emphasized again and again in the Obama era.
A standard criticism of this view is that it elevates process over policy or, worse, that it amounts to a kind of ideological surrender to those on the political left who view government as a hammer. Yet while I certainly appreciate the impatience and dismay many of my fellow conservatives feel in the Obama era, the relentless intensity of these critiques suggests it’s time to relearn a lesson many of us once took for granted: if you want to be a US senator, you need to be at peace with imperfect outcomes. Conservative icon William F. Buckley urged us, if ever faced with a choice between competing Republicans, to opt for the most conservative candidate who could win. The same maxim should apply to our shared legislative goals. The point here isn’t to get comfortable with failure. It is to recognize that failure today often carries the seed of tomorrow’s success. It’s to see the wisdom in the metaphor of the hitchhiker: if the first car that stops is only going halfway to your destination, take it.
I first internalized this lesson from studying the great legislative battles of the mid-nineteenth century, which make today’s political fights look perfectly tame by comparison. It’s a lesson I then learned firsthand in a decades-long battle of inches over campaign finance reform. And it’s a lesson I’ve relearned in recent years as a restive faction of Republicans have turned their guns on each other in frustration over their inability to halt the latest incarnation of the ideological left.
These shortsighted and self-interested operatives have exploited these natural frustrations by sowing confusion and discord among our ranks, splitting our party’s natural coalitions, handing victory after victory to our political adversaries, and enriching themselves in the process. These people not only give a bad name to conservatism, they have had a p
oisonous impact on our politics. By setting up impossible goals and then decrying those who fail to achieve them, they create an endless cycle of distrust and finger-pointing that empowers no one but themselves and their ideological opponents. They have become a cancer within the Republican Party, and for too long no one was willing to call them out. When I decided to do so, I took a lot of heat. But it was absolutely the right thing to do.
The answer to Barack Obama and the march of the Left is not to rail against one’s fellow conservatives, it’s to make better arguments, build broad coalitions, win elections, and stick together. The changes we seek won’t come quickly or all at once, but they will be more durable when they do arrive because they will have been achieved through persuasion and, ideally, on a bipartisan basis. As Henry Clay once put it: “All legislation, all government, all society, is founded upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these everything is based . . . let him who elevates himself above humanity, above its weaknesses, its infirmities, its wants, its necessities, say, if he pleases, I will never compromise; but let no one who is not above the frailties of our common nature disdain compromises.” This is a program for success in a body of a hundred strong-willed men and women, each with his and her own interests and views. It requires deep understanding, an ability to listen, great patience, and a willingness to subordinate one’s own idea of perfection for the moment in the interest of achieving long-term goals later on. It means viewing the legislative process as the best means we have for making good decisions collectively.
I say all this not only because I believe in the Senate, but because I believe in my party. Not unlike the country itself, the Republican Party is a big, boisterous coalition with a proud history. From abolitionism, to geographic expansion through the Homestead Act, to the vast expansion of educational opportunity through the establishment of land grant universities, to women’s suffrage, the early causes of our party were rooted in a profound optimism about our ability to carry out the promise of the Founding Fathers even as we looked beyond colonial-era horizons and constraints. The boat may be unsteady at times, and no one would argue that Republicanism is the perfect expression of conservatism. But no national party can ever be expected to achieve ideological perfection. What the Republican Party is, is the best political expression we have for communicating a set of shared principles to the national audience we will need to remain relevant. A party is not a church; it is a tool for achieving broadly shared goals.
Many today aren’t satisfied with this vision of party politics. And while enforced uniformity is not a quality typically associated with conservatism, the irony is that many conservatives today are surprisingly quick to embrace it. Many a Burkean now detests the kind of incrementalism, institutionalism, and realism that once defined them. But we simply cannot let the skirmishes of the moment turn us into a regional party, which is precisely what we will become if we fixate on hunting heretics within our ranks. This challenge is of course not unique to us. Democrats are arguably far more rigorous about enforcing a rigid ideological code than Republicans, and in my view their extremism on an issue like abortion or their reflexive dovishness in an age of terror, to take just two examples, is bound to catch up with them. And while individual Democrats may still believe in the importance of religiously informed values or the right to turn a profit, the contempt that the national party appears to have for both is alarming to big segments of the population and carries its own risks of regionalism. But I’ll let the Democrats figure all that out. My concern is with my own party and its future.
Throughout the Obama era, I have tried to do two things well: make it clear to the voters which party was responsible for the worst elements of this president’s legislative agenda, and, once we had resumed control of both houses of Congress in the elections that followed, responsibly wield the tools the voters had entrusted us with. Legislatively, that meant achieving whatever was still possible, and worth doing, as long as Barack Obama continued to wield the veto pen. Given this president’s far-left vision for the country, there was not a whole lot we could expect to accomplish together. But my view is that that was no excuse to do nothing at all. I also set out to repair the damage Democratic leaders had done to the Senate over the previous eight years. That meant reactivating the all-but-dormant committee process, allowing debate and amendment on the Senate floor again, and reestablishing the kind of normal budgeting process that had languished under the leadership of my predecessor. In short order, we passed legislation aimed at curbing the scourge of human trafficking, a federal budget that would balance in ten years, a free trade agreement that would enable a president of either party to expand the market for US-made goods, the first five-year highway bill in nearly two decades, a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind education bill that some have described as the greatest devolution of power from the federal government to the states in a generation, and a bill that permanently prevents states and localities from taxing the Internet or e-mail. Among many other bipartisan legislative achievements, we also passed important legislation that will give us the tools we need to combat cyber-attacks.
Admittedly, none of these things will get average Republican primary voters on their feet. But compared with the legislative graveyard of the prior several years, the new Republican-led Senate looked like an Amazon fulfillment center. This impression was further reinforced when the Washington Post’s Fact Checker issued three Pinocchios to Harry Reid’s risible claim toward the end of our first full year in the majority that the new Republican majority was “the least productive in history.”
All of this was as good for the country as it was for the institution. And it was good for our politics. Those of us who had become too accustomed to partisanship learned we could accomplish some very worthwhile goals by extending a hand across the aisle. And that we could enjoy ourselves and the job of legislating in the process.
The principle was simple: If the voters decide they want one party to run the White House and another to run Congress, it doesn’t mean they want you to do nothing. It means they don’t want one party to do whatever it wants. They want us to come together and do the things we can agree on. And that’s just what we’ve done. From time to time, we have also passed legislation aimed at making a point. Shortly before our first year in the majority was through, I worked hard to pass an Obamacare repeal bill. I didn’t expect the president it’s named after to sign it. But it was important for the country to see that in the face of all the calamities this law has wrought, the president remains stuck in cement on the issue.
This is the great irony of progressivism: what is held out as the tonic for the masses is imposed whether the masses like it or not. In the name of equality, any difference of opinion or dissent is either ignored or crushed. To liberals today, true diversity, ideological diversity, is an obstacle to some vague vision of a life without risk or difference.
Difference is not something to be stamped out. It is something to be confronted and mediated in a way that’s broadly acceptable to the public. And I think we’ve come a long way. In the end, the goal isn’t a perfectly running congressional machine or a party without blemish or inner turmoil. The goal is to allow the country to work out its differences freely and energetically, confident that the institutions the Founders left us are capable of accommodating the disputes and disagreements that arise in a nation as big and diverse and open as ours.
So much of liberalism seems rooted not in gratitude but in contempt for the past. It’s one of the dividing lines between progressivism on the one hand and conservatism on the other. Both sides tend to caricature the other along these lines, often unfairly. But a lifetime in politics has only reinforced for me the importance of preserving what is good about our country and our shared experience as a people committed to self-governance, a process that is fair, open, and free, and the rule of law.
In many years of travels around Kentucky, I have seen the extraordinary wo
rk of ordinary people through the kind of civic, religious, and business groups that serve as the tissue between individuals and their government. I have met and been inspired by individuals like David Jones, a man who told me early on in my career that the most important word in the English language is “focus,” and who went on to found one of the nation’s largest health-care companies in my hometown; Eula Hall, the self-described “hillbilly activist” who has devoted her entire adult life to the medical care and support of the poor in eastern Kentucky; and Dr. Noelle Hunter, a college professor and proud single mom from Morehead, Kentucky, who invited so many others, including me, into a personal crusade to bring her abducted daughter home from West Africa. These are the people who have made my job so rewarding over the years, and they, not the government, are what makes our nation great. We need to make it easier, not harder, for people like them to emerge and to see their dreams and aspirations through.
I love America. And as I look back on my many years in public life, I think the simplest way to describe my philosophy is to say that I have tried in my own small way to preserve those things I find most lovable about my country. Viewed in this way I can now see a line, however faint, running between my long fight for free speech at home and fair and open elections in Suu Kyi’s Burma. I see how an early appreciation for the Senate rules, which empowered one young senator without any real connections or influence, would motivate him years later in a battle to preserve them. I can see how early obstacles and conflicts in an otherwise ordinary postwar life in the American South prepared me for later threats to a great political party that has played a crucial and profoundly underappreciated role in the flourishing of our nation and all its people. And I can see how a little boy with little prospects for what the world calls success can find sustenance for a lifetime of battles in a mother’s patient hands. I have learned that the story of a nation’s success, and the success of each one of us, is a slow awakening to the timeless value of the long game.
The Long Game Page 26