Meet the new boss: quietly, Senate Republicans have already chosen Mitch McConnell as their next leader—because Congress just isn't partisan enough

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2006 by Zachary Roth, Cliff Schecter

As the gambit over Kerry's Iraq amendment showed, McConnell has no such weaknesses. He's a master of Senate rules and procedures, and he harbors no presidential aspirations that might distract him from his job. But unlike earlier leaders, he doesn't keep score by legislative accomplishments. For the first time in recent memory, the Senate will be run by a leader with both the ability and the desire to use the institution entirely for partisan advantage.

The hustler

When Addison Mitchell McConnell was two years old, he was diagnosed with polio. Though he remained able to walk, doctors, fearing that pressure could make his legs develop abnormally, instructed his mother to keep her son off his feet for several years. Adhering to this stricture seems to have forged in McConnell a kind of dogged determination, as well as a faith that patient, disciplined effort will ultimately be rewarded. Today, the only sign of his childhood illness is a slight limp when he walks down steps.

McConnell has been in training all his life for the job he will take over next year. He caught the political bug as a young man, getting elected student body president at the University of Louisville, then student bar president at the University of Kentucky law school. After poor eyesight kept him out of Vietnam, he came to Washington to intern with Kentucky's Republican senator, John Sherman Cooper, and eventually worked in the Justice Department during the Ford administration. In 1978, McConnell won his first elective office, county judge executive for Jefferson County, but he had his eye on bigger things.

A few years later, a group of Kentucky political journalists threw a birthday party for Louisville Times columnist Bob Hill. Hill had a famously poor relationship with McConnell, so, as a joke, Hill's friends invited McConnell along. McConnell arrived with an attractive blonde on his arm (he would later marry Elaine Chao, now the Secretary of Labor), then proceeded, calmly and methodically, to lay out for the assembled reporters his plan to win a U.S. Senate seat in 1984 by using a socially conservative message and hard-hitting TV advertising. Few of McConnell's listeners took him seriously--Kentucky was a solidly Democratic state, and his prospective opponent, Sen. Dee Huddleston, was popular. But McConnell followed his plan to the letter: To make the point that Huddleston was not spending enough time in the Capitol, McConnell ran TV ads that showed bloodhounds sniffing around Washington trying to pick up the senator's scent, and ended with a shot of Huddleston's name plaque visible on his unoccupied Senate desk. Helped by Ronald Reagan's landslide presidential win that year, McConnell pulled off an upset victory by less than half a percentage point.

Since arriving in Washington, McConnell has used two major tactics to get to the top. He has ensured himself a steady flow of campaign dollars by going all out on behalf of the Republican Party's financial backers--and has then used these contributions to build his own, and his party's, political power. At the same time, he seems to understand that with his grey demeanor and indifferent communication skills, he's poorly suited to adopt the kind of high-profile, media-friendly causes that most U.S. senators (think John McCain) compete to associate themselves with. Instead--like the short, unathletic kid who wins a place on the high-school basketball team by hustling, playing defense, and washing the uniforms--he has gained the support of his colleagues by shrewdly focusing on the less glamorous, behind-the-scenes grunt work, while acting as a frontman for unpopular causes that bring negative publicity others would rather avoid.