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The 7 must-read passages from Mitch "The Turtle" McConnell's new book

The Senate leader writes about his almost-retirement and his personal peeves with Obama and Reid.

By Seung Min Kim

Mitch Turtle-head McConnell considered quitting the Senate before his 2014 reelection bid, concerned that his “dismal” approval ratings would hurt his party’s chances retaking the Senate majority that year.

McConnell, of course, plowed ahead. But the admission in his new memoir is an unusually candid one from the famously guarded pol, who was eventually persuaded by a longtime trusted aide to stay in the race.

In his book out this week, “The Long Game,” the top Senate Republican takes aim at his usual Democratic rivals such as President Barack Obama, whom the majority leader clearly finds frustrating.

But McConnell unleashed some sharp barbs for members of his own party, too, taking special aim at former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.).

Here's POLITICO’s guide to the buzziest passages in McConnell’s 278-page book:

Almost calling it quits

The 2014 campaign clinched McConnell’s lifelong dream of becoming Senate majority leader. But his reelection bid almost never happened, McConnell writes. He recalls looking at his poll numbers in 2013, which he described as “dismal” and potentially a drag on other Republican candidates.

“What if I lost and kept us from taking the majority?” McConnell writes. “My first obligation has always been to help the party succeed, and while I never expressed my doubts publicly, I had begun to seriously consider if it was in fact time to find a better candidate.”

McConnell aired his concerns at the time with Kyle Simmons, his former chief of staff with whom McConnell remained close. Simmons argued against dropping out, saying no other politician could withstand the pressure of running in such a targeted seat. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would only be more emboldened by McConnell’s exit, Simmons told the senator, arguing that Democrats were trying to “spook” the GOP leader by dwelling on his poor approval ratings.

“After Kyle left, I took a few moments to sit in the quiet, thinking of what he had said,” McConnell writes. “I was facing a very difficult fight, yes. But I’d been fighting my whole life.”

A ‘particularly annoying’ meeting with Obama

The Senate leader hasn't shied away from publicly blasting Obama. But in his memoir, McConnell reveals some private interactions with the president that set him off.

Meetings with Obama all open the same way, McConnell writes. “Almost without exception, President Obama begins serious policy discussions by explaining why everyone else is wrong. After he assigns straw men to your views, he enthusiastically attempts to knock them down with a theatrically earnest re-litigation of what you’ve missed about his brilliance.”

Once, McConnell recalls, he spent a phone call with Obama watching “at least” an inning of baseball.

In the heat of the “fiscal cliff” crisis in 2012, McConnell and the other three congressional leaders were summoned to the White House to hammer out a solution before the Bush tax cuts were set to expire at the end of the year. But this Dec. 28, 2012 meeting left McConnell notably peeved.

“Obama’s condescending attempts to lecture us about why everything we were negotiating for was wrong were particularly annoying, given that we were seriously under the gun,” McConnell writes. The two hours spent in the meeting, he recalls, “would have been more productive had I spent them napping.”

When the president insulted his aide

It was New Year’s Eve 2012 and the country was about to careen off the fiscal cliff. Vice President Joe Biden suggested a phone call between Obama and McConnell as a way to break the logjam. But during the conversation — which included Rohit Kumar, then McConnell’s deputy chief of staff — Obama was “helpful as I had expected,” the senator recalls sarcastically.

“‘Rohit is being a real jerk about the spending offsets,’ the president said, to my surprise, and my frustration,” McConnell writes. “Personally criticizing a member of my staff hardly seemed like the way to negotiate a deal.”

Kumar seemed to take it in stride: “It’s not every day the president of the United States calls me a jerk,” he said, according to McConnell’s book.

The White House noted that Obama has personally thanked other Republican staffers in the past, and has not engaged directly with McConnell on his characterizations of Obama in the memoir. But press secretary Josh Earnest said this week that even McConnell has “acknowledged that the American people are better off than we were seven years ago.”

McConnell vs. DeMint

Fostering party unity — or at least avoiding intra-party sniping — is one of McConnell's key tasks as a party leader. But DeMint, McConnell writes, “took the practice of shooting inside the tent to another level.”

One specific instance triggered a private confrontation between the two men. When the Senate took up a deficit-reduction bill in 2005, DeMint approached McConnell and thanked him for his work on the legislation. Then the South Carolina senator voted against it. “That was the best we could do,” DeMint had said, according to McConnell.

“This exchange perfectly illustrated the hypocrisy of DeMint and his whole enterprise,” McConnell writes. “People like him were depending on me to pick up the pieces by brokering deals. He’d say it was the best we could do, privately, and then fund-raise by blasting me for the same deals.”

McConnell said he called DeMint into his office after the deficit-reduction episode and told him: “Jim … if you want my job, run for it.”

“This time, he had very little to say,” McConnell writes. A spokesman for DeMint at the Heritage Foundation, which he now leads, did not return a request for comment.

That ‘one-term president’ quip

McConnell's remark to National Journal in 2010 — that his single most important goal was to make Obama a "one-term president" — has followed him ever since.

Democrats have used the line to no end to paint McConnell as an obstructionist. But the senator argues in his memoir that his critics often forget what he said next in the same story: That he wanted Obama to triangulate so he and Republicans could work together.

“Well, I’ve been taken out of context in the past, but never more relentlessly than with regard to this comment,” McConnell writes. “Over the next few months, it seemed that every Democrat was handed the same talking point: remind people Mitch McConnell said his greatest legislative goal is to make Barack Obama a one-term president.”

McConnell continued: “Even Obama would exploit this comment, using it as one of the main riffs in his presidential campaign two years later. But to me, this reaction was nothing more than false outrage and political grandstanding.”

How he won the (student council) presidency 

A young Mitch McConnell at duPont Manual High School in Louisville ran relentlessly for student council president with two key ingredients of any successful campaign: star endorsements and hard work.

McConnell solicited the support of popular cheerleaders and talented jocks to propel his name ID over the other contenders. He printed pamphlets highlighting those endorsements, and walked the hallways stuffing the paper into all the lockers.

McConnell also made sure he contacted each voter, “even the underclassmen, often overlooked in these campaigns.”

“I was prepared to ask for their vote using the only tool in my arsenal, the one thing teenagers most desire. Flattery,” McConnell writes. “Not one person said no, and others quickly followed suit.”

He would ultimately defeat his school-age competitor. “Although I did feel a bit sorry for him,” McConnell writes, “I’d simply outworked him.”

On Harry Reid: ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’

One excerpt has already made lots of headlines: McConnell’s labeling of his Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” who is “rhetorically challenged” and lacking restraint that is “expected from a party leader.”

“In person, Harry is thoughtful, friendly, and funny,” McConnell writes. “But as soon as the cameras turn on or he’s offered a microphone, he becomes bombastic and unreasonable, spouting things that are both nasty and often untrue, forcing him to then later apologize."

Reid has replied that those characterizations were “fairly classless.”

McConnell details one instance in which he thought Reid went too far: In 2007, Reid declared that the war in Iraq was “lost.” In McConnell’s view, “of all the insensitive and regrettable things that have come out of Harry’s mouth, this has to be at the top of the list.”

“When we heard Reid make this comment, we pounced on it,” McConnell writes. “Someone on my staff pulled the audio and sent it to a reporter. That story quickly got picked up by the Drudge Report, where, within a half hour, it was the lead story.”