Subject: Strict Obstructionist - Atlantic
From: "Michael Andrews" <[email-masked]>
To: "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>, "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2011 08:48:54 -0500

January/February 2011Print | Close

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.”