Re-Thinking Mitch McConnell
This will (I really hope) be the last time in my life I write about Mitch McConnell. Sometimes, writing about policy and economic issues requires writing about how policy gets made. The behavioral reactions to incentives are fascinating microeconomic case studies, and that’s what I want this to be. This isn’t about politics per se, but about just how much McConnell has changed the way policy gets made.
It has been common wisdom among the DC types for a decade or more that Mitch McConnell is the best player the game has ever seen. I have always agreed with this; not long ago, I included this adulation in this very newsletter:
Say what you will about Mitch McConnell—and I’ve said a lot—but he is absolutely immune to Putinitis. His example here is the miracle cure we all need for Putinitis. What makes him immune? He never wants to be told what he wants to hear, only what he needs to hear. He isn’t the kind of guy who punishes people for disagreeing. Instead, he actively seeks out different points of view from his own and is excruciatingly careful about the information he uses to make decisions.
Above all, he understands one inoculating principle—smart people listen to those whose job depends on being right…
Political entertainment sources are not inherently bad, but the reason Mitch McConnell keeps winning is not because he listens to these entertainers. They have a role, but quality information isn’t it.
Find people whose job depends on being right. Experts in their fields who get fired if they are too wrong too often. Don’t just listen to the people who make you feel good—listen to the people who don’t care how you feel. It’s how Mitch McConnell has avoided the Putinitis plague for decades.
I’ve been thinking about the legacy of McConnell since I wrote that, and I’m not so sure I believe it any longer.
At the risk of spoiling the punch line; rather than a political genius, a careful look at how McConnell reacted to incentives suggests he was a broken clock that was only right twice, and he created a game that might now give him the legacy of a loser.
For reference for anyone who might not be a subscriber, I was born in Kentucky, and Mitch McConnell was my Senator when the doctor smacked me. All of my children were also born in Kentucky, and he was also our Senator for all their births too. I was the researcher for this NYT Best Seller. I have the experience, and I’ve put in the work to know McConnell’s career pretty thoroughly.
You should really read the book—it’s a funny and fascinating dive into the almost 40 year history of Kentucky since McConnell has been a Senator, written by people who love Kentucky like it was their own child.
I’m not writing about Kentucky today, but Kentucky is where all of this starts.
Roger Ailes, the man who made Fox News into the communications wing of the conservative movement, came to Kentucky to save McConnell. He was an ad man, and he cut a famous ad for McConnell that was, and this won’t surprise you, misleading and lacking context. It attacked the incumbent Kentucky Senator, Dee Huddleston, for missing votes rather than helping Kentucky.
Conventional political commentary would credit these Ailes ads for McConnell’s surprising upset of Huddleston. I, personally, give Reagan more credit for pulling McConnell over the line, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters about these ads is that McConnell began a decades-long symbiosis with Ailes. This ad was cut at a time when elections were still about policies; polite affairs of respect and courteous debate. A time when “there you go again, governor”, was considered a zinger. Whether because of this ad or not, McConnell learned that he could make politics into a game, and he could play to win.
From as early as records of his life exist, McConnell has really wanted only one thing—to be Senate Majority Leader. The pattern that one notices when studying McConnell’s career is that gaining power has never been about advancing political positions. He is happy to take any position if his evaluation of it leads him to believe it can help make him the majority leader. It was always a game to him, and he only cared about winning.
I’ll give you just a few examples for the sake of time—you should read Mitch, Please! if you want more detail. McConnell would dispute most of this, but the record, for anyone who wants to read it, is pretty clear.
Everyone who knew him or worked with him when he was a local elected official in Louisville, described him as a pro-choice politician. That is, until running for Senate in the Reagan era required he be pro-life.
McConnell was initially an anti-China hawk—right up there with Jesse Helms—until he started getting boatloads of Chinese money for his campaign. He flipped to push harder than just about anyone for China to have “most favored nation” trade status, and admission to the World Trade Organization. Kentucky workers paid the price.
McConnell has changed positions on money in politics more than perhaps any other issue. Once McConnell concluded money could help him, he fought against John McCain’s attempts to limit money in politics—and it’s corrupting influence. No public official has been more responsible for Supreme Court decisions allowing money in politics than McConnell.
McConnell once said, referring to money in politics, that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Now he wants to keep dark money donors secret.
McCain, on the Senate floor, called McConnell corrupt to his face, referring to a meeting in which McConnell had promised Republicans that Big Tobacco would reward them if they held the line on tobacco votes.
Of course, the famous McConnell promise that his number one priority was to make Barack Obama a one-term president.
The same year McConnell ran for senate, a little known firebrand named Rush Limbaugh started a conservative talk radio show. By 1988 Limbaugh became nationally syndicated, and by 1992 he was hosting his own national TV show.
It’s easy to forget, given how far the Republican Party moved toward Limbaugh’s ethos in the last decade or two, that Limbaugh was not a mainstream conservative. At a time when the Republican Party was desperately attempting to suppress and marginalize the racism and white supremacy that had sprouted in the healthy soil of their southern strategy, Limbaugh celebrated gay Americans dying of AIDS and ranted on about Feminazis. Anyone old enough to remember Limbaugh, or unfortunate enough to study his career, still hears these echos today from the herd of conservative commentators up in arms that single women don’t like them.
McConnell took the hint. As Limbaugh rose, in less than a decade, to be a national powerhouse of the populist right, McConnell saw that the game could be won by playing to this base. McConnell realized that Pat Buchanan was right, the largest political vacuum in the United States was to the right of Ronald Reagan. But Buchanan never overcame the Republican Party because he made one critical mistake—he behaved like the party. Buchanan attempted to materialize his fringe right populism through policy, through remaking laws to what the deepest and most resentful white Christians wanted. But this was always a doomed endeavor. One cannot use the party by being a more extreme version of the party. Buchanan, like nearly every other politician in American history, thought politics was about laws and policy. But the conservative base just wanted to win.
And thus the game began.
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McConnell played the game by playing the base. He judged the best way to win was to court the corporate elites and their coin. Keeping them happy, and their money flowing was key; the conservative base would file in as long as the Democrats were an evil menace. So, McConnell and his old pal Roger Ailes set out to make them evil. This was the key to the game. The Reaganesque idea that America was a nation united against external foes, like communism, wouldn’t do—couldn’t do—if McConnell, who holds all the charisma of moldy caviar, was to become leader of the Senate.
By the 2008 election, McConnell had succeeded. Democrats were the perilous evil. Barack Obama’s idea that we aren’t red states and blue states, but United States was never a unifying call to McConnell’s minions.
McConnell saw the crowds boo McCain when he defended Obama’s character, and tried to make the election about policy, and grinned.
McConnell realized that to win the game he had to abandon the policy goals for anger and grievance. Despite Obama governing as a more-or-less center right Republican, McConnell played the game, and the game meant making Obama a target.
This worked to remarkable success in 2010. Republicans dominated elections, winning the House and picking up six seats in the Senate—putting McConnell oh so close to being Majority Leader. The plan had worked. Republicans could govern for the corporate elites—with the only governing strategy being tax cuts and a repeal of Obamacare—but play to the rubes. McConnell was willing to talk a big game on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, but he knew these spelled electoral doom.
Then, in 2012, McConnell learned his most important lesson of the game. This wasn’t a game to the base. McConnell’s alliance with conservative media to billow anger and grievance had turned the political arena into a literal religious struggle for the Kingdom of God on Earth.
This divine quest brought forward the likes of “legitimate rape” Todd Akin, “rape and pregnancy are God’s plan” Richard Mourdock, and the “aspirin between the knees” Foster Friess backed presidential candidate, Rick Santorum. Republicans lost easily winnable senate seats in places like Indiana and Missouri, and McConnell again came up short of being Majority leader.
In 2014 McConnell would not let this mistake repeat itself. He mobilized his vast resources to protect corporate Republicans from attacks by the religious zealots on their right flank—Republicans like Thad Cochran in Mississippi. He even tried to placate Rand Paul, his fellow Kentuckian who had won a Senate seat in 2010, by hiring Jesse Benton as campaign manager. Many saw this move as and backroom deal to keep Paul from endorsing McConnell’s primary opponent. Benton, now convicted of directing Russian money to Republicans, was not just an operative, but also family to the Pauls. The McConnell campaign and PR staff aggressively downplayed both of these maneuvers with surprising ferocity.
It worked.
McConnell finally reached his goal. The game McConnell played to placate the base and keep candidates moderate gained him nine seats in 2014. He would finally be Majority Leader.
This gamification of politics was so strong it even became a feature, rather than a bug. Of the friends and acquaintances I know and have known who work or have worked for McConnell, any and every time someone has pointed out McConnell’s blatant hypocrisy on a position or the dirty tricks he has become so fond of, the response is almost always the same. A guilty grin, never accompanied by any attempt to justify or explain away the filth, and three simple words: “but he wins.”
And win he did.
At least, until a below average real estate heir and middling game show host came down a gilded escalator and rocked McConnell’s world. With one simple announcement, garnished with rapist and drug dealer fear mongering, Donald Trump sent McConnell a clear message: “Now I’m going to play the game.”
It was at this very moment that McConnell stopped winning. Right then and there he got Trumped, and he has never looked like a political genius again.
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Up to this point no other major politician had been playing the game. The John McCain’s and Mitt Romney’s of the world made the galant mistake of assuming politics was about ideas and policies. Trump knew from day one this wasn’t the case. In the game, politics was about tribalism and dominance. For the first time in McConnell’s entire career, he wasn’t the only one playing the game.
As it turns out a game show host, who seems to have been playing games with law enforcement for decades, was a far superior player than McConnell. Trump had all the reptilian instincts of McConnell and cared even less about the details of policy outcomes. But what McConnell lacked in charisma, Trump carried in spades. Trump was willing to tell votes that rich guys like him would hate his tax plan, then sell the largest tax cut the wealthy had ever seen as a win for the little man.
McConnell fought hard to keep Trump from winning the Republican primary in 2016, but he had only held these powers when he was the sole player in the game. Player number two, it turned out, had talent McConnell could only dream of. Trump won the primary, and thanks to the most unlikable and least trustworthy Democratic candidate in history, he became president. It should have always been clear that Trump was electoral poison. He lost the popular vote by more than 2 million votes. His win was the result of a few coin flip outcomes in key states where voters McConnell could never reach were mobilized for the first time.
The moment Trump’s term started, McConnell began losing. Roy Moore, the type of candidate that cost McConnell in 2012 and he worked hard to defeat in 2014, lost a senate seat in blood red Alabama to a Democrat. In one special election after another the tide not only turned, but surged against Republicans. The 2018 midterms were a thrashing, and Trump never stood a chance in 2020.
McConnell knew all of this, but he was never capable of winning after a second player entered the game.
McConnell had his chances to be rid of Trump, but he got out played every time. In Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress's Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, journalists Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian provide this outstanding quote from none other than Ted Cruz:
“Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.”
Who shot down the chance to be rid of the biggest loser? The Majority Leader himself.
“This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing…. It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
The new player in the game provided a new incentive. McConnell tried to balance his knowledge that Trump was a deadweight around Republicans’ chances to win elections with the knowledge that the Proud Boy and Oath Keeper types might not show up to vote at all if Trump was marginalized by Republicans. The 2020 elections show McConnell made the wrong call.
After the elections, when the two Democratic Party victories in Georgia senate runoffs showed how disastrous Trump and his Big Lie were for Republicans, McConnell lost at his own game again. He had planned to hear from constitutional scholars both for and against the notion that a former president could be impeached. McConnell wanted Trump impeached and convicted, he wanted him gone. McConnell couldn’t win unless he was the only player in the game. Then Rand Paul stepped in. Paul forced a vote on the issue before Republicans could hear from both sides, and McConnell got rolled again.
In the subsequent impeachment trial, after having already lost the Senate majority, McConnell again had the chance to get rid of Trump. Seven Republicans independently voted for conviction. Had there been 10 more, Trump could have been gone forever. Despite McConnell’s conclusion that Trump was guilty, he refused to vote that way—citing Rand Paul’s forced vote that had steamrolled McConnell. Here again, McConnell misread the incentives and made the wrong call. Getting 10 more Senators to convict Trump wouldn’t have been difficult: there were three retiring Republican senators and Republican leadership who all voted against conviction—that would have been more than half the necessary additional votes!
Pressure from the right—because McConnell was no longer the only one playing the game—created one unforced error for McConnell after another.
When introducing Kyrsten Sinema at the University of Louisville, he lauded praise for her support of the filibuster by saying: “If you break the institution, you break the country.” But McConnell’s gamification of politics had broken the Senate years earlier. Now, the only thing keeping him from a complete and total wipeout in the game was the filibuster—that was the institution he cared about.
McConnell broke the Senate when he held open a Supreme Court seat for the 2016 election. He broke the Senate when he rammed through Brett Kavanaugh despite credible accusations of sexual assault, blatant dishonesty under oath, and the FBI stonewalling the Senate’s request to investigate further. He broke the Senate when he reversed his 2016 position and rushed to fill a Supreme Court vacancy just days before a presidential election.
The result was a rapid overturning of Roe v. Wade, a decision that came back to cost Republicans massively in this year’s elections.
Since Trump came on the scene, it’s hard to think of a single play McConnell has made that he didn’t lose. The man who is styled as a political genius has only won when nobody else was playing the game. His trash heap of losses since 2016 have now cost him the Senate majority again. In a year that even a merely bad outcome would have given him the majority, Republicans had their worst election I have ever seen. McConnell blamed candidate quality, and this was definitely true. But in pointing this finger McConnell has tacitly admitted two things: first, that he has lost so many times he no longer has the strength to do what he did in 2014, and force bad candidates out; second, that his gamification of politics has led us to a place where candidate quality doesn’t matter in about 400 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. What was that he said about breaking institutions?
Not only was McConnell unable to prevent bad candidates, as he did in 2014, but he was forced to endorse them! Few defeats could be more stinging for McConnell than when these words left his lips: “I look forward to working with Herschel [Walker] in Washington to get the job done.”
We finally have an answer to the question the Baha Men asked 22 years ago. Mitch McConnell let the dogs out, and once they started catching cars he had no idea what to do with them. Now, the United States is left with a universally hated system that was built because McConnell was the only player in a game he created.
The Supreme Court’s approval rating and trustworthiness has never been lower—there isn’t even trust among the Justices!
McConnell promised China would democratize if Congress gave into his demands on trade status.1 Instead, China is more repressive and authoritarian than ever, and is now a global superpower that threatens the United States on many fronts
Citizens United and McCutcheon vs FEC have opened up the floodgates of special interest money into politics.
McConnell thinks the problem with all this money is that we know too much about who is spending it.
Foreign nations now buy political organizations to influence election outcomes.
But, above all, one decision from McConnell stands out as his biggest loss—and one that may haunt the United States and the world for decades.
McConnell, who survived Polio as a child, voiced no objection to the vaccine denialism infecting his base. He couldn’t. He had already lost that hand to Trump. Not only did this vaccine denialism possibly cost McConnell the Senate majority last week,2 but Polio is back in the United States for the first time in decades. Nobody understands the pain this virus can cause better than McConnell. Yet, for the good of the game, he decided that his fellow Americans suffering from vaccine preventable infections was a reasonable price to pay for winning. And he couldn’t even win.
McConnell lost. And he won’t lose even a minute of sleep from the choice he made to stay silent—a choice that might have cost lives. Because, why lose sleep over a game?
Maybe I’m wrong about all of this. Maybe McConnell is a genius. Maybe he made all the right decisions, and the wave of progressiveness was unavoidable as a reaction to Reaganism. Maybe McConnell is a guy who played a losing hand better than anyone else could have. Maybe my second guessing of his reputation is all explained by my disdain for his utter lack of decency, character, and interest in helping Kentuckians.
In 2024 the same set of Senate seats from 2018 will be up for elections. In that year Republicans picked up two Senate seats despite getting only 39% of the vote. In 2024 Democrats will be defending Montana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Arizona. Even if Trump is a ballast on the ballot, Republicans only need two of these for McConnell to finish his career where he always aimed to be—Senate Majority Leader.
If that happens he will likely be remembered as the political genius, the greatest to ever play the game. But I’m not so sure about this anymore. The more I think about it, the more it seems he was never any good at the game at all. He just spent decades as the only one playing.
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-Thanks,
Ellis, Curtis. “While D.C. Sleeps, China Plans to Replace America”. WorldNetDaily, 6 Feb, 2015.
Wallace, Jacob, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz. Excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic. No. w30512. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2022.