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Strict Obstructionist
MITCH MCCONNELL IS A MASTER MANIPULATOR AND STRATEGIST— THE UNHERALDED
ARCHITECT OF THE REPUBLICAN RESURGENCE. NOW THAT HIS RELENTLESS
TACTICS HAVE MADE HIS PARTY VICTORIOUS, HE IS POISED TO TAKE DOWN THE
PRESIDENT AND WIN THE SENATE MAJORITY HE COVETS—IF HE CAN FEND OFF THE
TEA PARTY AND KEEP HIS OWN CAUCUS TOGETHER.

By Joshua Green


Stephen Voss

IF YOU WERE to look for the very last moment when the Democrats might
have avoided, or at least mitigated, the wave that swept over them in
November, it may have come on Tuesday, September 14, just after
lunchtime. That’s when Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader
from Kentucky, emerged from a weekly caucus meeting to address
reporters gathered beneath the Ohio Clock in the U.S. Capitol and take
care of an important piece of business. Two days earlier, on the CBS
show Face the Nation, McConnell’s counterpart in the House of
Representatives, John Boehner of Ohio, had blundered in answering a
hypothetical question by suggesting he would consider something short
of a full extension of the Bush-era tax cuts. The White House intended
to frame the election as a choice between the party of the middle
class (Democrats) and the party of the rich (Republicans) by splitting
the extension into two votes: one tax cut for the middle class, and
another for the rich. Republicans had steadfastly refused—until
Boehner flinched. The next day’s New York Times headline was “Boehner
Shifts on Tax-Cut Bill Backed by Democrats.” Sensing controversy and a
change in momentum, the media were eager to pounce. Boehner had wisely
vanished, leaving McConnell to repair the damage.

Flanked by his leadership team, McConnell stepped to the microphone
and proceeded to extinguish any hope of a compromise. In his curt
southern manner, he declared that Republicans were united in wanting
to extend all the tax cuts; that several Democrats had voiced unease
about the White House strategy; and that he would relish the chance to
talk about the Bush tax cuts, whose expiration, he warned, would
“throw a wet blanket over the recovery.”

McConnell, 68, is owlish, phlegmatic, and gray, and often looks
bothered, as though lunch isn’t agreeing with him. He has been
described as having “the natural charisma of an oyster.” Yet you sense
that this is not so much a burden as a choice, that he has pared away
any qualities extraneous to his political advancement. McConnell has
the relentless drive and ambition you frequently encounter in
Washington. But unlike so many others, he longs to be not president
but majority leader of the Senate—a position conferred by his peers
and not voters, so geniality and popularity with the press don’t
interest him. “Every answer he ever gives is geared toward strategy
within the Senate,” says his friend Senator Robert Bennett of Utah,
meaning this as a compliment.

McConnell nevertheless manipulates the press masterfully, using
methods that are head-smackingly obvious and yet still elude most
politicians. He knows exactly what he wants to say, repeats it with
emphasis, then stops. He will not be drawn out, and has no compunction
about refusing questions. He would never make Boehner’s mistake,
because he won’t entertain hypotheticals. “We don’t issue a whole lot
of currency,” his spokesman says. What McConnell does say makes news.

At the press conference, reporters jockeyed to throw him off message
and extract some further bit that might drive the story forward. His
unvarying reply when asked about Boehner was: “It does not make sense
to raise taxes in a recession,” a phrase he uttered nine times in
barely as many minutes. The effect was like watching a swarm of
mosquitoes encounter a bug zapper. After he wrapped up the
proceedings, the reporters broke their huddle and scurried to button
hole individual senators. McConnell ignored them and walked off. The
story soon dried up. No vote took place. And the elections were, as
McConnell intended them to be, an unadulterated referendum on
President Obama.

WHEN A PARTY loses a presidential election, a void opens up at the
top. In the past two years, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck,
and John Boehner have each been put forward as the de facto leader of
the Republican Party. But at least in Washington, McConnell has been
the crucial man. When Obama took office with large majorities in
Congress, it seemed possible that the country might be on the cusp of
a Democratic era. Nobody anticipated the Republican swing only two
years later, in part because besides lacking a leader, the party had
not formulated any clear set of ideas that might bring one about. And
the poisonous tenor of today’s politics has surprised the many people
who believed that Obama would usher in the “post-partisan” age he
summoned so convincingly on the campaign trail. McConnell had a lot to
do with both outcomes.

Many times in the past, when the country has gotten into real trouble,
the parties have come together to do what is necessary to set things
right again. A good recent illustration is the Troubled Asset Relief
Program (aka “the bailout”), which kept the economy from collapse, was
supported by both party leaderships and was signed into law by
President Bush in October 2008. McConnell calledTARP’s passage “one of
the finest moments in the history of the Senate.” Obama took over
expecting this spirit to endure. But from the outset, McConnell
blocked or frustrated just about everything the administration tried
to do, including the government’s distribution of TARP funds, in
January 2009, just three months after McConnell voted to authorize them.

When I visited McConnell in Kentucky just before the midterm
elections, he cast his opposition as a principled response to
Democratic attempts to exploit a national crisis. “Rahm Emanuel
famously said, ‘A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,’” he told me.
“They rolled out what we thought was a hard-left agenda. Looking at it
from their point of view, at the time, it was not an irrational
decision. They thought they had an extraordinarily popular president,
and they were just gonna do it, things they’d wanted to do for 30
years that had been bottled up, either because it was a Republican
president or because it was a Republican Congress. There was always
some impediment that prevented them from Europeanizing the country.
And so all of a sudden, this was their shot.” There’s some truth to
this line of criticism—especially where it pertains to the stimulus,
which included much that wasn’t directly related to jump-starting the
economy.

But McConnell didn’t waste the crisis, either. He has used it to chart
a path back from oblivion for the Republican Party, mainly by blocking
or delaying Democratic bills and then raising an outcry about the
travesties being perpetrated on the country. Democrats may have won on
health care, the stimulus, Wall Street reform, and a host of other
measures that made the last Congress the most productive in a
generation. But, at least for now, they have lost the political
battle. Significant numbers of Americans disapprove of these policies,
especially the expansion of health care. Many of them have been
convinced by McConnell’s skillful exertions— especially his gift for
scornful neologisms, which has helped to demonize not just Democratic
policies but the very manner in which they came into being. (Roger
Ailes, the Fox News chairman, was a campaign adviser early in
McConnell’s career.) If you got upset when you heard about the
“Cornhusker Kickback” or the “Louisiana Purchase”—or perhaps you were
lectured by a Fox News–watching relative who did—that was McConnell.
He coined the terms to cast sinister aspersions on what were actually
typical instances of political horse-trading, in this case over health
care.

Two years into his presidency, Barack Obama no longer seems the
obvious heir to John F. Kennedy, no one talks about post-partisanship
anymore, and the atmosphere in Washington has returned to its ugly
pre-2008 standoff. McConnell has been remarkably successful at turning
the country against the Democrats. But not successful enough for
everyone. The grim irony of his predicament is that by having been in
Washington for 30 years, and having supported the bailout and
congressional earmarks, he is viewed with contempt by the activist far
right of his party, which has the momentum right now. For all his
careful plotting and obstructing, McConnell has come under frequent
criticism from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party for not
doing more, not going further, not pulling down the pillars of the
temple. And for all that he exemplifies the win-at-all-costs mentality
that is the essence of the conservative mood, McConnell isn’t getting
much credit. But now that he’s led Republicans this far, the White
House and the Senate majority he covets are both within reach. To get
there, he’ll probably become even more aggressive. Just before the
midterm elections, McConnell dispensed with the usual platitudes about
working together and declared publicly, “The single most important
thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term
president.”

MCCONNELL WAS BORN in the Muscle Shoals region of Alabama in 1942. At
age 2, with his father overseas in the Army, he developed polio in his
left leg, and he attributes his lifelong determination to the
influence of his mother, who conducted rigorous therapy sessions and
enforced his doctor’s instructions not to walk. When he was in middle
school, his father transferred jobs, and the family relocated to
Louisville. A recent biography of McConnell describes him, already
fully recognizable as a high-school freshman, plotting a successful
campaign to win the student-body presidency in his junior year.

McConnell has always been a Republican, though not the kind for whom
ideology holds any great importance. What he believes in is winning.
His formative political experience was figuring out how to get elected
and amass power as a Republican in the 1970s and ’80s in a heavily
Democratic state.

After compiling a résumé designed for a career in politics—a stint in
the Army (aborted when he was discharged for poor eyesight); degrees
from the state’s two major schools, the University of Louisville
(undergraduate) and the University of Kentucky (law); service to both
of Kentucky’s U.S. senators; a low-level appointment in the Ford
administration—McConnell became chairman of the Jefferson County GOP,
where he identified strongly enough with the liberal wing of the
Republican Party to name his cat after Nelson Rockefeller. His
proudest accomplishment as an elected official during these years was
using federal money to double the size of Jefferson Memorial Forest,
the 6,200-acre wilderness outside Louis ville.

In 1977, he won public office for the first time, becoming a Jefferson
County judge—an important administrative post—in what was then the
most expensive race in Louisville political history. McConnell came
away convinced that Republicans could prevail so long as they were
able to outspend their opponents, a lesson he has carried throughout
his career. He turned himself into a prolific fund-raiser, gradually
building Kentucky’s Republican infrastructure and operating as a power
broker in the state even after being elected to the Senate in 1984.

For most of his time in the Senate, McConnell has been notable chiefly
for maintaining a staunch opposition to campaign-finance reform that
pitted him against one of his party’s biggest celebrities, Senator
John McCain. At the time, McCain was still beloved by the press corps,
and the cause of ridding politics of the corrupting influence of money
had both a virtue and a momentum that ensured steady coverage.
Charmless and dour, McConnell was an irresistible villain. The
experience cannot have been pleasant, even for him. In addition to
facing public scorn, he often had to operate without the support of
his party leadership (a Republican president, George W. Bush, would
eventually sign campaign-finance reform into law). This forced him to
rely on procedural maneuvers to block objectionable legislation. It
was then that McConnell developed many of the strategies he would
later employ against the Obama administration.

In 1994, a time of comparatively civil interparty relations, when
Democrats still controlled the White House and Congress, McConnell,
trying to stop a reform bill that provided public financing for
congressional races and had already passed both houses, discovered
from the secretary of the Senate that the rules permitted a filibuster
on the motion referring the bill to the House-Senate conference
committee that would iron out the differences. But she advised him
against trying, since no one ever had before. McConnell ignored her
and succeeded, blocking the reform. Six weeks later, the Republicans
captured the House and Senate.

WHEN BARACK OBAMA won the presidency, and the Republicans were reduced
to a rump minority, McConnell was less rattled than just about any
other Republican. “I remember coming to work on the day after the 2006
and the 2008 elections, when we’d just gotten drubbed,” Billy Piper,
McConnell’s longtime chief of staff, told me. “And his attitude was
‘Let’s get back to work.’ He’s the least personal politician I’ve ever
been around.” Senator Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who
agreed to become Obama’s commerce secretary and then abruptly backed
out, described the mood of the Republican caucus as “shell-shocked.”
McConnell told Gregg, a member of his leadership team, that taking the
post would be a serious mistake. He also may have foreseen difficulty
for his friend in a White House that he fully intended to frustrate. A
few days after the election, when the country was fully enraptured
with Obama, McConnell told the conservative columnist George Will,
“Governing is a hazardous business for presidential parties.”

McConnell called Obama on election night to congratulate him and
received a call back two days later, as he stood in the cereal aisle
of a Kroger supermarket in Louisville. Several people close to
McConnell suggested that there was a real basis afterward for thinking
they might work together. McConnell didn’t remember it that way. “The
phone calls were just touching base,” he told me. “More significant, I
think, is the fact that he and I didn’t have a private meeting until
just before the August recess” of last year. His firm position is that
the White House never had any interest in getting input from the
minority, and marched off toward its liberal utopia, leaving
Republicans no choice but to obstruct.

They went about this by escalating an arms race that had been building
in the Senate for the better part of a decade: the increasingly
aggressive use of rules and procedures by successive minorities to
frustrate the will of the majority. The very first bill to be
considered on the Senate floor in the 111th Congress, in early January
of 2009, before Obama was even inaugurated, was the Public Land
Management Act, a sweeping conservation measure with broad bipartisan
support that would protect 2 million acres of parks and wilderness in
nine states. The Republicans filibustered, forcing a series of votes
and requiring a weekend session to finish. The bill eventually passed,
77–20.

The same tactics were deployed against most other initiatives, and
expanded into new realms. Traditionally, only votes on the most
controversial judicial nominees had been delayed or filibustered,
although the number crept upward during Bill Clinton’s and George W.
Bush’s presidencies. Under McConnell, Republicans have also
filibustered noncontroversial nominees, many later confirmed
unanimously. They have filibustered even nominees put forward by
Republican senators, and required separate votes for district-court
judges, who used to be confirmed in groups as a matter of routine. The
resulting increase in vacancies has exacerbated a shortage of judges
across the country, leading many districts to declare “judicial
emergencies”—vacancy levels so high that they threaten the courts’
ability to function. McConnell bet (correctly) that he would pay no
political price for this type of obstruction, because the White House
and the media would be preoccupied with other things—things even
harder to accomplish as the Senate calendar filled up.

“Reporters underestimate how powerful the calendar is,” says Jim
Manley, the former communications director for Harry Reid, the
Democratic Senate leader. “Say you want to break a filibuster. On
Monday, you file cloture on a motion to proceed for a vote on
Wednesday. Assuming you get it, your opponents are allowed 30 hours of
debate post-cloture on the motion to proceed. That takes you to
Friday, and doesn’t cover amendments. The following Monday you file
cloture on the bill itself, vote Wednesday, then 30 more hours of
debate, and suddenly two weeks have gone by, for something that’s not
even controversial.” All of this has slowed Senate business to a crawl.

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,”
McConnell says. “Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only
way the American people would know that a great debate was going on
was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the
‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have
been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way
forward.”

More difficult was figuring out how to go up against the president
himself. “Saint Barack,” as Republican aides called him, was wildly
popular, and Republicans were not. From the outset, McConnell believed
there would be opportunities for political arbitrage when the White
House overreached. A voracious consumer of polling data, he was
persuaded that although Obama and the Democrats had won handily,
independent voters were not inclined to support liberal policies. “He
concluded,” says a Republican strategist, “that people were exhausted
from Bush and a seemingly intractable war. We’re a country of five-
second sound bites and 30-second commercials. Eight years of one
person is just too much.”

At a senators’ retreat in January 2009, McConnell circulated a
strategy memo among his morose colleagues urging them to keep their
focus on independents. “He kept saying to us, ‘Do not panic, do not
give up,’” one senator told me. “He kept pointing out to us that while
Obama had approval ratings in the 70s, he was not invulnerable. He
said, ‘Let’s not confront him across the board, frontally. Let’s pick
the fights we know we can win.’”

McConnell initially had to struggle for purchase. But in February, he
settled on opposing Obama’s plan to close the terrorist-detention
center at Guantánamo Bay. Somewhat unusually, the campaign was not
orchestrated from some smoke-filled room but on the Senate floor
itself. Most mornings, McConnell would give a speech of just a minute
or two laying out the day’s message about Guantánamo (often the same
one). His phraseology would be picked up by other Republican lawmakers
and Fox News, and echo around the blogosphere. He gave 25 such
speeches. “Winning on Guantánamo,” the senator told me, “sent a
message to all of us that Obama was not bulletproof.” McConnell
deployed the same daily barrage against financial reform (16 floor
speeches) and health care (105 floor speeches). Along with the endless
delays, this exacted a heavy toll on Democratic approval ratings.
Obama could not evolve into a post-partisan leader, because McConnell
wouldn’t let him. He pegged Obama as either too narcissistic or too
naive to recognize that his promise of a harmonious new age was beyond
his capacity to deliver. Harmony is easily withheld.

By November 2009, when Republican candidates swept the governors’
races in Virginia and New Jersey, the path back to power was clear:
continue delaying, while encouraging the impression that Obama was
pushing through an outrageous and objectionable agenda. Whoever was at
fault, voters would blame Obama. Health care became the great example.
“The fact that Obama’s health-care bill did not pass by the dates he
kept putting on it was not an accident,” Senator Bennett told me.
“McConnell knew the places to go, around the tank, and loosen a lug
bolt here, pour sand in a hydraulic receptacle there, and slow the
whole thing down. We finally ran out of options by Christmas Eve. But
in the process of that yearlong journey, the Republicans won the
public-relations battle.”

WE’VE HAD AN opportunity after almost two years to take a look at what
this administration has been doing,” McConnell declared one bright day
in late October. He was addressing the crowd gathered in a community
center in the coal-country hamlet of Beattyville, Kentucky, to hear an
“Update on Washington” from their state’s leading Republican. “It’s
running banks, insurance companies, car companies, nationalized the
student-loan business, took over our health care, passed a financial-
services bill that not a single banker in Kentucky thought was a good
idea,” he continued. “They’ve got people at the FCC trying to take
over the Internet. People at the National Labor Relations Board trying
to get rid of the secret ballots for labor-union elections. They
passed a budget that puts us on a path to double the national debt in
five years and triple it in 10. This is Big Government liberalism on
display.”

McConnell has been building and nurturing this narrative for the
better part of two years, channeling Americans’ anxieties and
frustrations with the way things are going into an antipathy toward
the federal government as run by Barack Obama and the Democratic
Congress. As a matter of both public opinion and electoral politics,
the results are plain. In 2006, Democrats won independent voters by an
18-point margin; last November, by an identical margin, these voters
swung Republican. This translated to historic Republican gains—more
than 60 House seats, six Senate seats, and five governorships—that
might have been even greater had discontent with Washington not wiped
out some of the GOP’s own candidates during primary season. In several
key states, activists championed extremely right-wing candidates for
the Senate, including Sharron Angle in Nevada, Christine O’Donnell in
Delaware, and Ken Buck in Colorado, whose losses probably cost
McConnell his Senate majority—for now.

It hasn’t gotten much attention, but there is also an ideological
question of whether the strategy that he has pursued serves the best
interest of the conservative cause. Just before the president signed
the health-care-reform law, the former Bush speechwriter David Frum
lit into his party’s leadership for not negotiating harder to align
the law with conservative principles. “What McConnell did was a
brilliant tactical success,” Frum told me. “But our job is to be
conservators of the Reagan Revolution. The new law increases the
Medicare payroll tax and increases the tax on investment income, which
kills job creation and investment. That could have been changed with a
handshake last year. Now it will require the House, the Senate, and a
Republican president. We may benefit politically in the short term,
but Democrats get a new entitlement program, which is the better end
of the deal.” Frum added that this is the problem inherent in any
strategy of outright disengagement: “McConnell is like a conservative
in a Victorian novel, who believes that change is necessarily for the
worse, and therefore must be blocked. But change comes anyway. So you
have to plan for it and make sure it happens on terms that you regard
as acceptable.”

Beyond this lies the fundamental question of whether a party has any
responsibility to address society’s problems in good faith. So far, Mc
Con nell’s legacy as Republican leader is to have taken his caucus
further than anyone else toward the proposition that it doesn’t. But
the public is not likely to notice that anytime soon.

American politics over the next two years will be far less preoccupied
with legislation and much more focused on a great clash of social
visions about the efficacy and desirability of government. For the
past two years, McConnell has been winning the argument that Obama and
the Democrats have essentially ceded, about the value and meaning of
the policies they fought so hard to pass. Much of the electorate, and
the media too, has come to accept the basic outlines of the worldview
that McConnell expounded in Beattyville.

John Boehner and the Republican House will be free to pass all sorts
of bills designed to bedevil the White House. But how effective that
strategy is will ultimately depend on what happens to the bills in the
Senate. However things play out on television, McConnell will still be
the key man.

But he’ll have the constant headache of his party’s right wing.
McConnell’s nemesis is no Democrat but Senator Jim DeMint, the self-
aggrandizing South Carolina conservative who campaigned for many of
the Tea Party candidates who disrupted GOP primaries—including in
Kentucky, where Rand Paul embarrassed McConnell by soundly defeating
his choice to fill an open Senate seat. Activists like DeMint and Paul
are already giving McConnell fits, by focusing their ire on the
practical apparatus of politics—party committees, earmarks, patronage—
that McConnell prizes and that wins campaigns. And McConnell is not
the sort to submit quietly to tests of his purity. When I asked him
whether he would vote for the bailout if he had it to do over again,
he replied, “Based on what we knew then, yes.”

On the other hand, McConnell will also have more room to maneuver. The
new Senate has more Republicans, but also a large number of “in cycle”
Democrats—those up for reelection in 2012—from red or reddish states
like Montana, Nebraska, Florida, and West Virginia, who won’t want to
be seen as the president’s handmaidens.

Someone with McConnell’s distinct talents and willingness to go to
extremes ought to thrive in these circumstances. The legislative
imperative has been subordinated to the larger task of shaping the
public’s opinion of the opposition in advance of the presidential
election. Last year’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v.
Federal Election Commission, which overturned campaign-finance limits
and unleashed a flood of corporate money into campaigns, will only
help him. Politics as war: that’s what will occupy McConnell, and all
of Washington, in 2011.

“When I came to the Senate,” Bennett told me, “Bob Dole was the
leader, and he was superb. Absolutely on top of his game, on top of
the institution. Nobody approached Dole. It’s a very different Senate
today, very different political atmosphere. Dole would be deeply
frustrated. McConnell is the right guy for this atmosphere. McConnell,
in this circumstance, is approaching Dole’s capacity to dominate
events. These are very different times. But he’s a very different man.”