— by Bill Straub, Northern Kentucky Tribune —
Mitch McConnell is hanging it up.
Thursday, on the occasion of his 83rd birthday, McConnell (R-Louisville) took to the floor of his favorite haunt, the Senate, and officially announced he would not be seeking re-election.
“Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,” McConnell said. “Representing our Commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”
Whatever you might think of Addison Mitchell McConnell, and, let’s face it, the reviews are mixed, he has earned a spot on Kentucky’s political Mt. Rushmore as the longest serving Senate Republican leader in the chamber’s history, 18 years. He ranks with the likes of Henry Clay, Alben Barkley, and A.B. “Happy” Chandler (Lincoln, of course, gets a spot all his own) among the Commonwealth’s most consequential political leaders.
The big question, frankly, revolves around how he managed to pull it off. McConnell himself will acknowledge he’s not exactly a matinee idol and with his small frame no one has ever mistaken him for Charles Atlas. He is not a charismatic politician like Chandler, who could spin stories, tell jokes, sing Psalms, shake the hands of everyone in the crowd and remember their names.
McConnell’s voice, a low garble that has gotten more guttural with age, reminds no one of Pavarotti. Throughout his tenure serving Kentucky in DC for 40 years now, his direct contact with the voting public was generally limited – can anyone out there remember him ever having a Town Hall where he conversed with constituents?
He is not one to set anyone’s heart aflutter. Yet, McConnell won seven times, often by huge margins. He was, and still is, a political thinker who knows his foe’s weak spots. Like many successful office holders, his modus operandi was the aggressive negative attack rather than the promotion of his own accomplishments. That and the general rightward swing of the Commonwealth’s electorate worked in his favor.
But where McConnell really excelled was in raising money – lots of it. Tons of it. While most politicians whine like babies about the process of dialing for dollars, McConnell thrived on it. And he used that money on a seemingly infinite number of television ads urging Kentucky voters to return him to the one job he ever really desired.
They answered with a yes.
McConnell accomplished this political success despite disdain poured upon him like water from Democrats and, ironically, many Republicans, mainly from the old Tea Party faction – the Boone County Republican Party has formed a habit of censuring him, most recently last month when he opposed the nomination of Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth, saying McConnell “no longer represents the will of the people of Boone County, Kentucky, or the great State of Kentucky…”
So, given all that, what does the man who took great pride and amusement in being referred to as Darth Vader, accomplish?
First, to cite the great James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. McConnell displayed uncommon courage in overcoming a childhood bout with polio to rise like a rocket in the political field, first as Jefferson County judge-executive and eventually, in his most famous role, U.S. senator, exhibiting the stamina to stay there for seven terms, unprecedented for the Commonwealth.
McConnell is widely hailed, and he should be, for invigorating a moribund Kentucky Republican Party, which is now, without fear of contradiction, the Commonwealth’s pre-eminent powerhouse. The GOP as late as 1987 experienced a hard time just finding an adequate candidate for governor, finally settling on John Harper, a state representative from Shepherdsville who was as good a man as you could find but simply didn’t have what it takes. It could be argued that Kentucky’s switch to the GOP was bound to happen anyway given the current political climate but McConnell succeeded where all others failed.
And he accomplished some worthwhile things in the chamber he called home. A new bridge spanning the Ohio River connecting Covington with Cincinnati is a result of his efforts. And he did yeoman’s work regarding the neutralizing and destruction of chemical weapons at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County, once the site of only two storage sites for the nation’s chemical weapons stockpile.
There were, of course, other gains that should be noted. Suffice to say McConnell achieved some noteworthy accomplishments during his 40-plus years in Washington.
Sadly, the story doesn’t end there.
It’s unlikely history will be kind to Mitch McConnell on a number of fronts. It’s fair to say his deficits outweigh the assets as Senate Republican leader, a tragedy because he had the ability to do so much better. Instead, he seemed to get devoured by the DC power game, reveling in his reputation as a master of the Senate’s arcane rules and his manipulation of the chamber’s sometimes odd customs that led to his reputation as a legislative wizard.
But it too often seemed like he was playing the game for the game’s sake, not to accomplish anything of value. His ego proved too powerful a force to reel in.
McConnell’s downward slide began before he entered leadership when he uncompromisingly opposed efforts to reform campaign finance laws, insisting that money was akin to freedom of speech and any efforts to impose limitations, like in the McCain-Feingold legislation, was illegitimate.
McConnell eventually won that fight in the Supreme Court and earned the enmity of Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, the party’s 2008 presidential candidate. That worthless victory has resulted in the current mess of a wild west campaign system the nation faces today where money, not people, does all the talking.
Now, to be fair, everyone is entitled to a misstep. But things got worse.
The U.S. encountered a severe financial crisis in 2008, the same year Democrat Barack Obama was elected president. The nation entered a recession, and Obama could use all the help he could get to direct America back toward the right economic track.
McConnell, then Republican leader, said no.
As noted by Sen. George Voinovich, R-OH, “If he (Obama) was for it, we had to be against it.”
For reasons that remain unclear to this day, something about the president being a know-it-all, which is not an unusual condition for presidents, McConnell despised Obama and did whatever he could to upend the administration and, thus the economy. In October 2010, McConnell told the National Review, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” not getting the economy back on track.
The nation was in dire straits for months and McConnell sat on his hands.
In his Senate floor speech announcing his intention to retire, McConnell mentioned, as he often does, a man he idolized, the late Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Somerset.
“I got a front-row seat to the greatness of Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky as a summer intern in his office,” McConnell said. “But at so many moments in my early career, the idea of following in his footsteps here felt more distant than the moon.”
My dear friend, Jamie Lucke, now the editor-in-chief at the Kentucky Lantern, wrote a great column a few years back for the Lexington Herald-Leader, explaining how Cooper had befriended and helped a young senator from the opposing party, fellow named John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts, and showed him the ropes in the sometimes bewildering chamber. When Kennedy became president in 1961, his first venture out of the White House with First Lady Jackie was to have dinner with Cooper and his wife in their Georgetown home.
Ironically, as a result of his dealings with Obama during a crisis, McConnell emerged as something of an anti-Sherman Cooper. Instead of offering a hand he helped introduce the polarization we still face today.
There is so much more. McConnell’s wheeling and dealing with Supreme Court nominations was overtly unconscionable. While serving in the majority, he refused to even consider Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the court for 14 months, saying the change shouldn’t be made until after the general election, almost a year away. He eventually saw to it that conservative Neil Gorsuch took the slot. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died, he took a different tact and rushed the nomination of conservative Amy Coney Barrett through the Senate, gaining confirmation three weeks before the next general election.
Then, of course, there was were dealings with President Donald J. Trump, pushing through much of the administration’s agenda in his first term even though the two men loathed each other. Then, infamously, after losing the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump instituted an insurrection on the Capitol.
The story’s well worn, we don’t have to tramp over old ground. McConnell held Trump accountable for the riot, leading to an avalanche of invective from the president, who abused McConnell’s wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chou, with a racist insult.
But when push came to shove, McConnell refused to rally Senate Republicans to impeach Trump and wound up voting against the articles himself. Then, when Trump collected enough delegates to capture to Republican presidential nomination in 2024, McConnell endorsed him.
It really is an ugly history. And more could be added. In these last few months McConnell has stood tall, continuing his support for Ukraine in the face of Trump perfidy and voted against several Trump cabinet nominees, sometimes flying solo among Republicans.
But, as the old saying goes, he came to say hello when it was time to say goodbye.
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