USA TODAY International Edition
McConnell to GOP on Trump: Relax
LOUISVILLE Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who learned an early lesson about the value of patience and persistence during a childhood bout with polio, has some advice for Republicans alarmed about the prospect of having presidential candidate Donald Trump at the top of the ticket and in the White House. Relax. “Some people have said our nominee is too controversial and that will cause you problems,” McConnell acknowledged in an interview about his memoir, The Long Game, being published Tuesday by Sentinel. “But by the way, the Democratic nominee is pretty controversial, too. The negatives on both these candidates at the moment are stunningly high.” By Election Day, he says dryly, “It’ll be interesting to see whose negatives are the highest.”
Just two years ago, at age 72, McConnell reached the goal of a lifetime — Senate majority leader — when Republicans regained control and with it more power to frustrate President Obama’s ambitions and set a political agenda of their own.
While non- partisan analysts say Democrats have an easier path to win the Senate in November, McConnell says there is a 5050 chance the GOP can maintain its majority.
He’s urging GOP candidates worried that Trump’s provocative views will hurt their prospects to run campaigns focused on their individual accomplishments for their particular states.
He tells them they should feel free to point out issues on which they disagree with Trump.
Even so, McConnell matter- offactly endorsed Trump when it was clear the real- estate mogul would win the nomination, a stark contrast to the continuing deliberations by House Speaker Paul Ryan. McConnell sees no political percentage in Republicans trying to disassociate themselves from the presumptive
nominee by saying they won’t vote for him.
“I think that would be a mistake,” McConnell says, “because, obviously, you would like the people who are voting for your candidate for president to vote for you.” He reassures Republicans nervous about whether their nominee’s ideology and temperament that a President Trump “would be fine.”
McConnell has managed to become the longest- serving senator in Kentucky history and a leader who has forged a disparate Republican caucus into a nearly united force on battles from opposing the Affordable Care Act to blocking the Supreme Court confirmation of Merrick Garland.
He has been the scourge of both Tea Party- inspired conservatives and the Obama White House. In short, he has been a master of the long game.
POLIO’S MARK
“My first memory in life was my last visit to Warm Springs,” McConnell says.
Just 4 years old, McConnell and his mother had spent the previous two years traveling the 60 miles from Five Points, Ala., to Warm Springs, the small Georgia town that drew polio victims for treatment.
The news for McConnell in 1946 was life- changing. “Nurses told my mother that I was going to be OK,” he recalls. “They thought I could walk without a limp and without a brace. And we stopped in a shoe store on the way home and bought a pair of ... Oxford shoes, which was sort of a symbol that I was going to be a normal little boy.”
The disease had only a limited lasting impact on him physically, on his left quadriceps.
The impact on his persona may have been greater. He marvels at his mother’s perseverance in following doctors’ orders that her son, 2 years old when he contracted polio, perform painful stretching exercises and avoid walking altogether until they said the time was right.
“Can you imagine keeping a 2year- old and a 3- year- old off their feet?” he says. “She did it for two years, like a drill sergeant. And that tenacity, that lesson ( is) that if you just keep working on something and ( are) not defeated by the inevitable speed bumps that we all hit in life, that you can probably get where you’re headed.”
Patience, persistence and a willingness to accept small steps toward a larger goal are traits that apply to his chosen career, he says. “The Senate rewards that sort of thing,” he says.
That attitude has put him at odds with the Senate Conservatives Fund and other Tea Partyinspired groups that have targeted some Republican senators as insufficiently conservative in favor of more combative challengers. McConnell blasts former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, who founded the group, as a hypocrite who would be “almost submissive” in meetings with his colleagues only to emerge to bash them to reporters.
“It’s important to remember the basic principle that winners make policy and losers go home,” McConnell says, saying he prefers to work “in the field of the achievable.” He blames the nomination of “unelectable” conservatives for costing Republicans three Senate seats in 2010 — in Colorado, Delaware and Nevada — and two more in 2012, in Indiana and Missouri.
In 2014, McConnell himself became a target, challenged for re- nomination by conservative businessman Matt Bevin, now Kentucky’s governor. In his memoir, McConnell reveals for the first time that he seriously considered not running for a sixth term for fear that his “dismal” approval ratings would mean Democrats could gain the seat. He attributes his decision to run to a childhood lesson when his father forced him to confront a neighborhood bully with the Dickensian name of Dicky McGrew.
“I beat him up and I bent his glasses and we never had another problem,” McConnell recalls. “During this period, when I was wondering the best way to react to being hit from the right as being an Obama enabler and obviously being a target on the left ... I just remembered that I beat Dicky up and I can beat these guys.”
McConnell dispatched Bevin in the primary and Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in the general election. Republicans overall gained nine Senate seats and with it the control they had lost eight years earlier, making McConnell majority leader. At last. ‘ PROFESSOR’ OBAMA McConnell is sitting in the archives of the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, his alma mater.
He and his wife, former Labor secretary Elaine Chao, live in a modest brick duplex in the Highlands neighborhood just a 10minute drive away. On display at the center is the “I Like Ike” button McConnell wore on his shirt collar for his fifth- grade photo and memorabilia from campaigns starting with the student- council elections at duPont Manual High School — where he won the presidency in an upset, by the way.
His 278- page memoir offers a glimpse into McConnell’s personal story and settles some scores.
His portrait of Obama is scathing, at one point sarcastically referring to him as “Professor” Obama. He argues that the president’s arrogance and refusal to negotiate cost him compromises that might have been achievable with Republicans during the final two years of his tenure, including on overhauling the tax code and addressing the long- term sustainability of entitlement programs.
McConnell also questions Obama’s decision to visit Hiroshima on Friday during his Asian tour.
“It looked a little bit like an apology, and believe me there’s nothing to apologize for,” McConnell says. His father, just back from fighting in Europe during World War II, had received orders to deploy to the Pacific when President Truman ordered atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting the Japanese to surrender. “I can tell you that the decision to drop the bomb was really popular in our house and all across America.”
Surprisingly, another senator with whom McConnell often has tangled doesn’t appear in the book: Ted Cruz of Texas. The conservative Republican and presidential hopeful has been a burr in McConnell’s side, once calling him a liar on the Senate floor.
“The Washington Post gave him three Pinocchios for calling me a liar,” McConnell says, noting the judgment of the newspaper’s factchecking column. He says Cruz isn’t mentioned in his memoir because he’s “not a significant part of my story.” And Trump? McConnell says he has no problem envisioning working with Trump in the White House.
“Our nominee brags about, I think correctly, as somebody who’s transactional, somebody who, as he puts it, makes deals. Well, that’s what you have to do in order to function legislatively, so I’m not worried about it at all. I think he’d be fine,” he says, dismissing concerns by some Republicans about his ideology and persona. He notes that the framework of the Constitution “constrains all of us, members of Congress and the president.”
“I want to win the election, and I have to say Donald Trump has done a good job so far of winning elections,” McConnell says. “I hope he can win one more.”