The Myth of Mitch

The Myth of Mitch McConnell, Political Super-Genius

The Senate majority leader has been coasting on an inflated reputation for too long. This week exposed just how little he has achieved.

By ADAM JENTLESON

The past eight months of massive and avoidable failures have delivered such a devastating blow to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s reputation for political savvy, it’s a wonder it ever existed at all.

Mitch McConnell

So how did the Myth of McConnell get started in the first place? The story is one of cynicism, self-promotion and credulousness, born out of desperation for bipartisanship and craving for familiar roles in an era when American politics veered into uncharted territory.

For the uninitiated, the Myth goes something like this: A calculating Kentuckian, he sees three steps ahead while playing eight-dimensional chess on his solved Rubik’s cube with one hand, while using the other to hold an inside straight close to his vest, which is embroidered with Masonic secrets that only he can read and that unlock true mastery of the Senate, along with eternal enlightenment, for good measure.

In the Myth of McConnell, grand achievements are conjured out of last-minute, crisis-driven exercises in can-kicking—like extending the U.S. borrowing authority and government funding—all things that used to happen routinely before McConnell became leader of the Republican Caucus and unleashed his unique brand of unprecedented obstructionism on the Senate, manufacturing the very crises that made the last-minute deals necessary. Meanwhile, humdrum political events, like winning reelection in a deep red state in a strong year for Republicans—as McConnell did in 2014—are recast as achievements of Machiavellian brilliance.

If any believers in the Myth remain after the brutal week McConnell just endured, which capped off an unbelievably brutal eight months, they should take this challenge: Name one major legislative accomplishment to McConnell’s credit over the more than 30 years he has been in the Senate. (Last minute deals don’t count.)

You can’t do it: Unlike former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (my former boss) and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, McConnell has never authored a single piece of major legislation that became law, nor has he successfully shepherded a single major bill to passage as leader. Reid, Pelosi and former President Barack Obama were all party to the last-minute deals, but they all have a trove of historic accomplishments to show for their leadership: insuring millions of Americans through the Affordable Care Act, reforming the post-crash financial system with Dodd-Frank and ending the Iraq war, for starters. McConnell has nothing.

His failure to log even a single major achievement is without precedent in recent American history. It’s not like he hasn’t had the opportunity: Not only has McConnell enjoyed 250 days of unified Republican control in 2017, he also led a GOP majority in the Senate for the previous two years, paired with a solid Republican majority in the House. But under McConnell’s leadership, even bills backed by strong bipartisan support, tagged as likely to pass by seasoned Hill observers and likely to be signed by Obama, languished.

Remember the criminal justice reform bill? That effort was supported by a high-powered, bipartisan cast that included Senators Cornyn, Grassley, Scott, Leahy, Durbin and Booker, along with the Koch brothers. It never came to the floor, dogged for months by rumors that McConnell opposed it until he finally stuck the knife in it in the fall of 2016.

So where does the Myth of McConnell come from?

The Myth is manufactured out of a deeply cynical but highly effective public relations insight that McConnell exploited to maximum effect: If he simply labeled everything Obama and Democrats tried to do as “partisan,” regardless of the merits, then invented institutionalist-sounding reasons for his opposition, and conveyed those reasons in polished speeches delivered from the Senate floor in his rolling Kentucky drawl, the news media and the commentators would eat it up. He realized that he didn’t have to be a bipartisanship-seeking institutionalist—he could just play one on TV, giving him cover to push partisanship to the hilt in private.

The gambit worked—for a while.

In the post-2010 midterms stretch of the Obama administration, during which I served as a senior aide to Reid, watching the Myth take shape was like watching a banner being unfurled in slow motion. McConnell appeared to have learned from the blowback to his oft-quoted 2010 admission, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” He probably also learned from the blowback to a 2010 New York Times article, in which he bragged a little too openly about dissuading members of his conference who wanted to work with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act, and turning a concept derived from The Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney into a “partisan” bill.

From then on, the Myth advanced on the back of a steady series of crisis-driven deals, which McConnell spun as grand legislative accomplishments. From the 2010 extension of the Bush tax cuts to the debt ceiling debacle of 2011 to the fiscal cliff of 2012, McConnell repeatedly brought America to the brink of crisis and then reaped credit for deciding not to push the country over the cliff. The deals were usually temporary, focused on blame-avoidance. Often, they set up future crises. And you don’t have to take this Democrat’s word for it: When Senator Tom Coburn was asked whether the 2011 debt ceiling deal provided certainty for the future or advanced any core Republican priorities, he replied, “No, it’s a political answer.”

As McConnell refined his approach, he zeroed in on his primary audience: the news media. That so many smart people would fall for his act is understandable, since in an era where Republican deal-makers were basically extinct, someone had to balance out the GOP side of the “both sides” seesaw, and McConnell was the best of what was around. But if you asked a reporter—over beers, say—to back up the Myth, the conversation would go something like, “Debt ceiling, fiscal cliff, I think he did something on Burma ...” and then trail off.

The Myth was accepted because the Washington hive brain needed a counterpart to the ambitious agenda of Obama, Reid and Pelosi, and the subdued, refined McConnell, who could soothe and snow reporters with talk of Senate procedure and institutional precedent as easily as rolling out of bed, felt like the right fit.

But when reporters had to put the Myth into print, they struggled, and things could get a little weird. For example, a 2011 Time magazine profile headlined “McConnell: The GOP’s Dealmaker,” neglected to cite a single deal McConnell made in his three-decade Senate career, aside from a last-minute, two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts. Stretching, the piece bizarrely credits McConnell with repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and ratifying the START treaty, both of which he voted against and the latter of which he opposed in highly vocal fashion.

McConnell’s unique ability to manufacture a crisis and then reap a windfall of credit for muddling through it is encapsulated in his 2014 quip, “Remember me? I’m the guy who gets us out of shutdowns.” Not mentioned is the fact that a few months earlier, he had been the guy who got us into the first government shutdown in 20 years. Yet this quote was reprinted over and over again in support of the Myth, casting McConnell as the savior, not the destroyer.

Finally, in 2016, McConnell stunned the world by holding open a Supreme Court seat for Trump to fill. Many, including me, viewed this as a reckless and unsustainable gambit at the time. Now, it looks like a stroke of genius, and it is the one legitimate accomplishment McConnell and his defenders can point to. But McConnell did not think Trump was going to win—by his own admission, he “didn’t think Trump had a chance.” If McConnell was merely delaying, holding the seat open for Clinton and a Democratic majority to fill, the blocking of Merrick Garland becomes one of self-preservation and blame-avoidance. McConnell had recently witnessed Speaker John Boehner get bounced out of office by a Tea Party rebellion, and he could surmise that if he let Obama fill Antonin Scalia’s seat, and then lost the Republicans’ Senate majority, he might suffer the same fate, or at least a major challenge.

It was a deeply cynical move, but cynicism is the lifeblood of McConnell’s career. There is no better example than this: When McConnell was a child, the March of Dimes helped him overcome polio. It’s a touching story McConnell told on the Senate floor and in his recent memoir; reporters often use it as a humanizing anecdote in profiles.

But when the March of Dimes came out against McConnell’s health care plan for the express reason that it would hurt their ability to help disadvantaged kids,like McConnell had been decades ago, how did he respond to the organization that saved his life? He refused to meet with them.

Mitch McConnell is good at many things: tactics, trolling Democrats, avoiding blame and spinning legislative straw into gold. But a master of the Senate? Not even close.