A few things are curiously missing from the Mitch McConnell-Elaine Chao Archives at the University of Louisville. At an exhibit designed to celebrate the Senate Majority Leader and his wife, there’s almost no mention of any bills McConnell has authored in his 32 years in the Senate. There’s virtually nothing about the people he’s helped, nothing to highlight courageous speeches made on the Senate floor.
Instead, McConnell's exhibit almost entirely pays homage to the elections he’s won — for high school student government; for Louisville county executive; for his first election to the Kentucky Senate; for his reelection bids to the Senate.
“All the things he chooses to present to the people who come there are about his races,” says Alec MacGillis, a ProPublica reporter and author of a 2014 McConnell biography, The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell, in an interview. "And that's all it is. There's almost nothing in those rooms about what he's actually accomplished in all of the decades he’s been in office."
This is, MacGillis thinks, the key to understanding the inscrutable Kentucky Senator. On Jan. 20, McConnell, 74, will become one of the most powerful men in America and one of the few potential checks on Donald Trump’s power.
So what McConnell really cares about will soon become a question of immense importance. Everyone has a rough idea of Speaker Paul Ryan’s vision for America because he likes to write it down and give speeches about it. For McConnell, the answer is both simpler and more inscrutable — he is obsessed with electoral self-preservation and improvement, with no clear larger purpose.
"Far more than other politicians, it really has been about simply the rise itself. Winning the next cycle. Staying in power as long as you can. Rising in the leadership ranks to the point where you are the leader of the body,” MacGillis says.
In interviews with close to 100 friends and colleagues, MacGillis tracked McConnell from his constant striving in high school for positions in student government, to his head-spinningly quick rejection of his once-moderate political persona, to his refusal to confront or even talk about the most critical policy fights facing his Senate caucus.
McConnell’s story is, on the one hand, a fascinatingly revealing account of how someone with so little charisma and so few ideological convictions can still ascend so high up the rungs of the power. But it is also one whose last and perhaps most important chapter is yet to be written — one which will finally and conclusively reveal if McConnell has been seeking power all of these years for its own exercise or in service of some greater (and still unknown) objective.
"The big question for the Trump era is now that (McConnell) has a big Republican majority to work with in the branches is: will he actually push for substantive ideological gains? Or has all that expediency; all that work; all this thinking about the election all the time — was it all toward this moment where he finally has control and can do what he wants substantively?,” MacGillis says. "Or will it continue to just be about the next cycle?"
A lightly edited transcript of my conversation with MacGillis follows.
The political education of Mitch McConnell
Jeff Stein
I wanted to start by asking if we could go back to one of your main projects in the McConnell's book: to discover his political education and origins.
You say he was a moderate Republican in the (Kentucky Sen. John Sherman) Cooper tradition — how real was that, and how do we square that with the conservative McConnell we see today?
Alec MacGillis
That's one of the real crucial questions about Mitch. I think it was real, but I also think it was shallow. It's extraordinary how moderate-to-liberal he was back then — you can't really overstate it. It's hard to believe now, but it was true; his great model was this liberal Republican from Kentucky who made his name standing up to (Sen. Joe) McCarthy, opposing Vietnam, and taking other stances that were very unpopular in Kentucky. And that was his great model early on.
Cooper took him to the signing of the Voting Rights Act when he was an intern on Capitol Hill. McConnell talks about how exciting that was to him. He was very involved in civil rights; he was adamantly pro-choice. When he was elected county executive in Jefferson County, Kentucky, he repeatedly worked with women's groups to help stymie anti-abortion legislation in the local government. He kept an arms length from the guns groups back then. He even recommended a piece by Playboy on moderate Republicanism to someone else.
There was a whole fight in the early 70s between the Goldwater wing and the quite-strong moderate to liberal wing. And McConnell was on the barricades on the liberal-to-moderate side, arguing for it to prevail. That was totally where he was back then, and the fact that he could then swing so swiftly once he got to Washington in 1984 after winning his first Senate race — he switched so quickly on so many issues, including abortion, to line up with the Reagan wing of the party that was then ascendant. He was not a Reagan person. He had supported (in Republican presidential primaries) Ford in 76; HW Bush in 80; then he quickly lined himself up with the Reagan Republicans.
My theory of that is: He barely won his first Senate race in 84, by less than 5,000 votes. Reagan won Kentucky by 280,000 votes. McConnell saw just how much more easily he won Kentucky, didn't want to have such a close election ever again, and it happened so quickly it suggests those early/moderate roots were shallow.
Jeff Stein
Just to stay on the question of McConnell in the 60s and 70s. Do you see the thesis of your work — that he openly says he cares about political expediency to a degree that's shocking — was that a through-line earlier in McConnell’s career? Were there inklings or origins you point to things earlier that fit that description?
Alec MacGillis
Yes. Even as you saw him as a moderate/liberal Republican earlier on, you saw these glimmers of expediency earlier — you can still see that the overriding desire was to win, and to an extent that's unusually strong even compared to other politicians.
In a way, you could say it even goes back to his high school campaigning years. He was one of those kids always running for office — high school, college — just always running for student government. Doing whatever he had to do to win those races and just taking it all way too seriously.
Jeff Stein
I love student government over-achiever stories about powerful politicians. There are great anecdotes in the Robert Caro book about LBJ going to incredible lengths to win school races.
Alec MacGillis
In high school government in Louisville, McConnell tried and failed a couple times in his early races. But he finally became the vice-president of the student council at duPont Manual High School.
He did this by figuring out that in a student body election, all votes count equally — so he targeted lower class-men and unpopular kids, who the upper class hot-shot candidates were looking past. Nameless kids. He stuck pamphlets in their lockers with lists of endorsements he received from, "The president of the Key Club." So he targeted the forgotten class of high school.
Then at the University of Louisville he lost a lot. He lost his races in succession for freshman class president; president of the student senate; and president of the student council. He lost all three and took them pretty hard and decided it was so painful he'd never lose ever again. Finally, junior year he wins presidency of the student council.
He's just running all the time. And when he gets to doing his first real elections — running for county government in Louisville — the expediency comes in two ways. One he's just incredibly malleable. That's the thing his political consultants marveled at when I talked to them. In ‘76, they were amazed by how he was so physically unskilled — totally lacking of natural charisma and natural political skills — but also very aware of that fact and so utterly willing to let them tell him what to do.
Shooting ads with him was relatively easy. Because as unskilled and hapless as he was, he completely submitted to their instructions far more than most candidates were willing to do.
As he was leaving his previous job with the Department of Justice in the Ford administration in Washington, he saw that the school busing fight was starting to brew back in Louisville. There had been a big busing fight there in the mid-70s, and McConnell fires off his resignation to Ford saying, "Thanks for having me; I'm going home to Louisville." He then threw in a gratuitous paragraphs saying, "Hey, please, take more notice of how concerned people are about school busing and appoint Supreme Court justices who will be more skeptical of the school busing and integration push." It was so clear he was doing this to leave a paper trail he could point to when he was running for office later.
How did Mitch McConnell become so powerful?
Jeff Stein
It's such an interesting question how someone with such little political charisma, and so lacking clear ideological convictions, could become the number three or two most powerful politician in the United States.
How does he deal with that problem in his early career? Is it just removing himself from the public eye and minimizing the number of debates and rallies? Very few all-time great baseball players can't field, hit, run, or pitch.
Alec MacGillis
It was an especially crippling drawback for him given that he was running in the upper-south, which has a long tradition of charismatic, wise-cracking, folksy politicians. That's even more expected there than it is elsewhere in the country, and he completely lacked that ability. As one of his Kentucky pals said to me, "He doesn't have the personality to wash a shotgun with."
He was very aware of this fact and compensated for it mainly by raising tons of money. His great epiphany early on was that he could overcome this deficiency by raising gobs and gobs of money, and then using that money to raise ads that would simply tear down the opponent.
That became his message, over and over: His own popularity was always middling; people were always ambivalent about him because of his lack of natural charm and constituency; he'd just tear down the other guy, so he'd be left standing as the fall-back alternative. In his first run for Senate, he worked with Roger Ailes, who came up with this legendary and notorious ad going after the Democrat with the hounddogs for the missed votes.
So a lot of it was the money. But the other part was being incredibly willing to stake out positions to help you win that one election — and then abandoning them to a degree most politicians would find shameless.
In ‘76, running for his first job as county executive, he came out in favor of collective bargaining for public employee unions and won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO in Louisville, and Kentucky was a strong union state. He also won the endorsement of the Courier-Journal, a very influential newspaper. He did that by taking a bunch of center-left positions, including campaign finance reform.
In the years since, he's admitted — openly! — that he took both of those positions for political expediency. That they were completely expedient and taken at the time to gain the support of these influential constituencies in Louisville.
Jeff Stein
If we're trying to be as generous as possible to the McConnell worldview, what's the story McConnell's friends and family would tell in his defense about the narrative of his life? I haven’t really found anything that isn't boilerplate. What is the story they tell you about how he sees his project?
Alec MacGillis
I spoke to a lot of his friends and close associates for the book, and they had a very hard time answering that question. That was the big last question I would ask them all. And they would be completely flummoxed by it to a really stunning degree — they couldn't come up with an answer to it.
And it really feels harsh to say and hard to confront directly but it really feels that, to him, far more than other politicians, it really has been about simply the rise itself. Winning the next cycle. Staying in power as long as you can. Rising in the leadership ranks to the point where you are the leader of the body.
Jeff Stein
And these are genuine close friends? People who like him and think he's fun to hang out with?
Alec MacGillis
If you really press them to define some ideology or political belief of his, they'll fall back on very generic talk about how he loves the country and wants the best for it, and how he believes in “freedom" and “democracy." But it's so generic as to be almost meaningless.
You have to see how he himself portrays his accomplishments and portrays his own career. There's this shrine for him at the University of Louisville, and it's an extraordinary thing. It's the Mitch McConnell and Elaine Chao (his wife) archive. And it's pretty difficult to access.
But in the antechambers of these archives there's this huge exhibit area, a shrine to McConnell and to Chao. And it has all of these exhibits about his life in politics and his career. And virtually all of the exhibits — all the things he chooses to present to the people who come there — are about his races. The high school races. His race in Louisville. His Senate race. His reelection. It's just one race after another.
And that's all it is. There's almost nothing in those rooms about what he's actually accomplished in all of those decades in office.
Jeff Stein
He seems not only devoid of ideological commitments, but in the public eye at least he just seems devoid of personality, too. It's rare for a public figure to have such an absence of hobbies or nicknames or anything like that.
How does a guy like that get other Republicans in the Senate to support him for this long? Is there a divide between that bland public image people receive, and the person he really is? Or is the understanding of him as someone who is sort of lifeless accurate once you see it closer up?
Alec MacGillis
It's pretty close to the reality of the man. He is said to have a wry, droll, almost English humor in person that does not come through so much in the public persona. But you're right — the fact that someone so colorless could get so far is extraordinary.
He really is kind of the Keyser Soze of the last year or two. All along he was the guy who made it happen for the Republicans. Very publicly, with the Supreme Court obstructionism, exploding that norm in a way that worked. And we've just learned he was more quietly having vast influence behind the scenes with the Russians and the attempts to keep that hacking private before the election.
That's why, as bland as he is, he's almost so bland it's kind of fascinating. He has people in his own caucus to be loyal to him — his lack of classic leadership traits is compensated for with money. Not only did he raise the money for them he also led the fight on campaign finance — he took the hits for all the Republicans on that. He was willing to put himself out there as the guy who opposed all of these limits.
It earned him scorn in certain corners, but he could take those shots because he knew it would produce affection from him among other Republicans.
The money thing — it's so telling that the one issue he really cares about and has invested himself in is campaign finance reform. It's the issue that's all about the game. It's a process issue that has everything to do with winning the next election.
Would Mitch McConnell stand up to Donald Trump?
Jeff Stein
So I think this is all incredibly useful for a question that — maybe I'm being dramatic here — but that could help determine the stability of the American republic.
It seems absolutely crucial to determine if McConnell will stand up to Trump on anything. Is there anything in McConnell's record that gives you faith in that?
Alec MacGillis
One thing one can say for McConnell, and he's done it again recently, is that when things really head to the brink — things like the debt ceiling crisis, the fiscal cliff, the government shut down — it was always McConnell at the very end cutting a deal with (Vice President Joe) Biden or whoever to avert the total crisis.
In the end, it was clear he was helping avert disaster. But he was always getting varied appeals from Republicans at those moments. He was using the extremism and nihilism of that wing of the party as a bargaining chip. Saying, "Hey, Biden or (Sen. Harry) Reid, you want to work with me because these guys could take that over the edge."
Jeff Stein
Even that can look like a political expedience argument for maintaining power. Today, Ross Douthat at the New York Times had a column trying to place Trump on the x-axis of populism on the one hand and conservatism on the other, and on the y-axis of authoritarianism on one end and chaos on the other. Where do you put McConnell on that grid?
Alec MacGillis
I see McConnell stepping into moments to try to avert the total crisis because there is in him just enough of a conservative instinct that at the end of the day wants to conserve the country. There's maybe just enough of that to help avert the crisis at the last moment. But he will get as much out of it as he can for the party.
The best gauge of what he will do is to ask the question, "What will he think most will help the party in the next cycle?" That is how he thinks. That is what it is all about. Whatever his calculus for how they will next perform in 2018 or 2020 — what he needs to do to win those elections, that's what will guide him.
And that's what guided him in the Obama years, and that's what will guide him in the Trump years. His insight was that the way you beat Obama is by grinding things to a halt, which would hurt the Democrats more because they were the party in the White House and the party of government, and because it would undermine Obama's whole comity schtick. Which paid off beyond McConnell's wildest dreams by now electing someone who fed off voter anger with Washington dysfunction.
Jeff Stein
But I think there's something actually comforting there for liberals. If you're a Democrat who is terrified what Paul Ryan wants to do to the safety net, then maybe there's an opportunity here to exert political pressure he may be genuinely responsive to.
On the other hand, it seems from what you're saying that the peril here is if standing up to Trump on something important is politically difficult — whether he fears a Trump backed primary candidate; or for increasing the divisions within the Republican primary — it seems extraordinarily unlikely he'll do that. Whereas as a McCain figure or even a Ryan figure might be more willing to make sacrifices that could hurt the party's cohesion for the country.
Alec MacGillis
You bring up an important point, which is that it's not just what will increase the chances for the party fairing well but also for himself fairing well in the next cycle. You can completely see him steering clear of complications with Trump if he worries it will hurt his own reelection in four years.
During Romney's election for so many other years as leader, McConnell was so closely tending to his own personal prospects. At crucial moments when he as Republican leader should have been stepping forward to really show the way on substantive issues, he was really just not there. Immigration, in 2006 and 2007, McConnell (then the leader) completely ducked out of the debate and did not even speak on the floor. He was just a non-entity and ceded his leadership role, essentially, because of how worried he was about how it would reelect his 2008 reelection.
In early summer of 2006, he went to Bush and said, “Mr. President, can you pull back the troops in Iraq? Because I'm worried how it will affect us in the midterms.'" That's amazing: He said to the president, about the president's number one initiative: Please reverse yourself for this election cycle.
And then in the past few years: the repeated unwillingness to stand up to the Tea Party wing as it was arriving. His unwillingness to confront it (and its brinksmanship) more publicly. Then there was this game he played with Rand Paul, when Paul took on his anointed guy for that Senate seat in Kentucky — a mild-moderate guy — and McConnell played this very clever game. Once he realized Paul had cut away, McConnell started reaching out to Rand Paul and the Rand Paul crowd even as his own guy was falling.
I have to say one thing I got wrong about McConnell this past year was that I was surprised by the decision with the Supreme Court and the Scalia seat because it seemed like he was doing something ideologically driven and less expedient. It seemed like refusing to even consider Obama's nomination he was risking firing up Democrats in a way that would hurt Republicans.
I wrote about that in the Times — that he was putting his chips out and taking a little risk for ideological gains. And in the end of course what followed was that he perhaps saw that blocking that nomination would fire up Republicans more and produce more cohesion for them and that the upset at the Democratic side would dissipate over time. That it would help Republicans win and also secure a lasting conservative ideological advantage.
The big question for the Trump era is now that he has a big Republican majority to work with in the branches is: will he actually push for substantive ideological gains? Or has all that expediency; all that work; all this thinking about the election — was it all toward this moment where he finally has control and can do what he wants substantively? Or will it continue to just be about the next cycle to the point where he's reluctant to do what Donald Trump or Paul Ryan wants to do because he fears they will hurt them in the next election.
That's the big question. At what point does the permanent campaign end for him? Or does it never end?