For most of his Senate career, Mitch McConnell stood out as one of the most openly ambitious, cynical, and ruthless operators in American politics — single-mindedly focused on winning.
Only toward the end of it — McConnell announced Wednesday that he’ll step down as leader in November — does he seem to have belatedly considered that other things, such as the continued functioning of democracy in the US, might matter, too. But that realization did not come soon enough.
McConnell, who repeatedly cited Ronald Reagan in his speech Wednesday, wanted to win and deliver for the old Republican Party. He achieved that. But what he failed to grasp was that the party had changed underneath him, threatening values he claimed to hold dear. The result was that all his winning may have come with catastrophic consequences, at home and abroad, should Trump return to the presidency.
According to McConnell’s memoir, he’d wanted to become majority leader since about the time he first joined the Senate in 1985. A little over two decades later, in 2006, the top GOP Senate job was opening up — but the party was polling poorly and at serious risk of losing its majority, in part due to President George W. Bush’s Iraq War.
So McConnell went to the Oval Office and privately asked Bush to start pulling out troops to help the GOP (and, implicitly, himself). Bush was irked, he later wrote in his memoir: “I made it clear I would set troop levels to achieve victory in Iraq, not victory at the polls.”
The ensuing blue wave meant McConnell began what would turn out to be an 18-year run in the top GOP Senate job as a mere minority leader. And as Republicans fell into a deep Senate hole in the 2008 elections, he’d spend years afterward single-mindedly devoted to the goal of getting that majority — filibustering Barack Obama’s agenda and nominees to an unprecedented degree, and escalating polarization and partisan combat.
Once McConnell got his majority (in the 2014…
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