Biographer] Alec MacGillis: it was Mitch McConnell’s overweening desire to win, and fear of losing — and desire to not just win but win big and be safe, politically safe, in Washington — that led him to shift so dramatically. If you were to pick one kind of key moment, it was '84, when he was elected by a very, very, very slim margin against the incumbent Democrat, whereas Ronald Reagan was elected by a huge margin in Kentucky, and McConnell had clearly come in only thanks to Reagan's coattails.
He was sort of embarrassed by that fact and declined to acknowledge it publicly, and just seems to have drawn from that experience, his near loss, which quite possibly might have ended his career right there. He seems to have concluded from that that he needed to get in line with where the Republican Party was going under Reagan, that he needed to adapt himself to the regional realignment of the Republican Party as it was moving from a party that still had liberal, moderate members ... to a party that was far more Southern (Isquith 1).
…In 1984, when McConnell first ran for Senate, he learned the politics of destruction at the hands of a master. His challenge to Sen. Walter “Dee” Huddleston, a genial two-term Democrat, looked like a distant long shot. But McConnell, who’d been re-elected judge executive in 1981, used his position to build up a fat campaign war chest, and he devoted a good amount of it to hiring the most notorious political hit man in America: Roger Ailes.
The future founder and CEO of Fox News had already established his well-earned reputation for flaunting the truth and grabbing the opposition by the jugular while working for Nixon and Reagan. For McConnell, he cooked up an ad that would become a classic of the genre. Called “Hound Dog,” it featured a pack of bloodhounds trying to sniff out Huddleston, who was allegedly neglecting his Senate duties to make paid political speeches around the country. In fact, as Newsweek reported, Huddleston had made 94 percent of Senate votes. But the hound dogs caught Kentuckians’ imaginations and completely changed the race. “[McConnell] was 40 points behind … but then they put up this ad and it made people laugh.” Most important, it was Huddleston they were snickering at.
McConnell squeaked into the Senate by the narrowest of victories — 5,000 votes statewide, a less-than-one-percent margin. He arrived in Washington as the only Republican to unseat a Democrat in the Senate that year. But he took no time to celebrate: He immediately set to work courting big donors for his re-election bid in 1990. “As I always say,” McConnell wrote in his book, “the three most important words in politics are ‘cash on hand.’ ”
McConnell cemented his reputation as a no-holds-barred campaigner in 1990, when he faced Democrat Harvey Sloane, a two-term Louisville mayor and Yale-educated doctor. McConnell rolled out a tactic he’d use again and again in future campaigns — making his opponent look like more of an outsider than the incumbent from Washington. McConnell had promised reporters he’d be running a purely positive campaign, but he broke that pledge with alacrity. At Fancy Farm in 1989, he lit into Sloane as the “wimp from the East” whose “mommy left him a million dollars” and who had “come down here to save us from ourselves.” (When reporters asked McConnell afterward why he’d already gone negative, he replied, “I just couldn’t help myself.”) Running with generous backing from the NRA, McConnell also painted Sloane as a gun-grabber. McConnell’s campaign sent endless mailers and ran streams of ads turning Sloane’s support for an assault-weapons ban into further evidence that he was an uppity liberal. McConnell, among his many pernicious contributions to American politics, became one of the first to successfully turn the Second Amendment into a cultural wedge issue. (Two decades later, when public outcry for gun-control measures swelled after 20 first-graders and six teachers were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, McConnell engineered a filibuster that prevented the Senate from even voting on a background-check requirement.)
With the election fast approaching, and McConnell’s lead too narrow for comfort, it was time for the coup de grâce. The senator’s campaign leaked to the press that Sloane, who hadn’t been practicing medicine for a few years, had renewed a prescription for his sleeping pills using his expired Drug Enforcement Administration credentials. Before long, Kentuckians’ airwaves were filled with ads featuring ominous images of vials and pills, with a deep-voiced narrator decrying Sloane’s habit of prescribing himself “mood-altering” “powerful depressants” at “double the safe dose without a legal permit” (Moser 16-17).
Sloane, an Ivy League-educated doctor whom McConnell mocked as “a wimp from the East,” had gone to Kentucky through a federal program that provides medical services to the rural poor, and went on to become Louisville’s mayor. During the Senate campaign, Sloane, who had postponed a hip replacement until after the election, renewed a prescription for sleeping pills although his license had expired. It was a real lapse in judgment, but he didn’t have a drug problem. Sloane said of McConnell’s attack, “It was craven. He’s just a conniving guy. He’s the Machiavelli of the twenty-first century.” McConnell himself has summarized his approach to campaigns simply: “If they throw a stone at you, you drop a boulder on them” (Mayer 15).
After throwing the kitchen sink at Sloane — whose political career never recovered — McConnell won narrowly, with just 52 percent of the vote. But with the GOP on the rise in Kentucky, and McConnell pulling the strings, he would never again come close to losing. Even so, he would always relish pummeling anyone who dared challenge him. As longtime Democratic operative Jim Cauley put it, “They take good people and make them bad.”
McConnell had become secure enough in Kentucky, and flush enough with big corporate donors, that he could focus more fully on his larger goal of elevating himself over his Republican colleagues in Washington. He would pursue Senate leadership the same way he’d approached winning elections from the start. He’d do whatever it took.
As a senator from a small state, graced with none of the backslapping bonhomie that traditionally led senators up the ladder to power, McConnell had to cast around for a way to rise. When he found it, it meant disavowing one of the few principles he still clung to.
Just as he’d originally run as a pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-civil-rights Republican, McConnell had a long history of calling for removing big money from politics. In 1973, not long after he was elected chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party, he’d written an op-ed for the Courier-Journal calling for “truly effective campaign finance reform” — lowering contribution limits, mandating public disclosure of donors, even capping how much a candidate could spend in a race. He’d later laugh this off, claiming he’d been “playing for headlines” to distract folks from the Watergate scandal. But in 1987, midway through his first term, McConnell floated a constitutional amendment to end what he called the “millionaire’s loophole” — the ability for wealthy Americans to spend limitless money on their own campaigns.
The proposal went nowhere, and in his second term, McConnell made a 180-degree turn and set himself down a path to becoming the most outspoken and influential opponent of campaign-finance restrictions in American history. At the same time, he began to master the art of tactical obstructionism. Democratic Sens. David Boren and George Mitchell had proposed a bill that included both spending limits and public financing for campaigns. While some Republicans were hesitant to speak out against a measure designed to tamp down on corruption, McConnell took the lead, blocking the bill by reviving the use of the filibuster, which still carried unsavory associations with segregationist efforts to block civil-rights measures in the Sixties. “Filibustering is sometimes presented as an obstructionist tactic by its opponents,” McConnell would later say, “but in my view, if legislation as awful as this bill is brought up for consideration, there is a duty to obstruct its passage.”
By 1997, McConnell’s reputation for relentless fundraising — “It’s a joy to him,” marveled Sen. Alan Simpson — had won him his first leadership post, as chairman of the Republican National Senatorial Committee. That same year, when a bill was floated to ban “soft money” — contributions to political parties that could be funneled into particular campaigns, allowing donors to exceed legal limits on donations — McConnell steeled the nerves of his fellow Republicans in opposing it: “If we stop this thing,” he reportedly told his colleagues, “we can control this institution for the next 20 years.” The fact that McConnell had himself proposed a soft-money ban four years earlier mattered not at all.
Two years later, McConnell clinched his reputation by fighting tooth-and-nail against fellow Republican John McCain’s effort to rein in campaign money with the McCain-Feingold Act. As the Senate debated the measure in October 1999, McConnell confronted McCain on the floor, demanding that he name senators he considered to be corrupted by donors’ money. “For there to be corruption,” McConnell said, “someone must be corrupt. I just ask my friend from Arizona what he has in mind here?”
When McCain refused to say which senators he had in mind, McConnell kept needling him. Finally McCain shot back: “A certain senator stood up and said it was OK for you not to vote for the tobacco bill because the tobacco companies will run ads in our favor.” That “certain senator,” as everyone knew, was McConnell.
Some senators might have been embarrassed. But the same sorts of scorched-earth tactics McConnell had used to win elections back home were now turning him into a national conservative antihero. McCain and the others could talk loftily about saving democracy; McConnell invited and embraced their scorn, knowing he was also winning the silent gratitude of many of his fellow senators. In a sense, he made himself a human shield for other Republicans opposed to reform. But he also got a kick out of being vilified. When U.S. News & World Report ran a headline calling McConnell the “Darth Vader” of campaign finance reform, he had it framed and hung in his office.
Lord Vader wasn’t finished. When McCain-Feingold became law, McConnell immediately lent his name to a lawsuit to block the law’s enforcement. In 2003, his suit lost on appeal in a narrow 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court. Undaunted, he then co-founded the James Madison Center for Free Speech in D.C., with arch-conservative lawyer James Bopp, who would bring the Citizens United case that, come 2010, would not only strike down McCain-Feingold but also legalize unlimited corporate contributions. By then, McConnell had been elected Republican leader — and was busy laying minefields in the legislative path of President Obama and the Democratic Congress (Moser 18-20).
In 1990, Ailes helped McConnell paint his Democratic challenger, Harvey Sloane, as a dangerous drug addict. Television ads showed images of pill containers as a narrator warned of Sloane’s reliance on “powerful,” “mood-altering” “depressants” that had been prescribed “without a legal permit.”
…
Most politicians find fund-raising odious, but Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, who served a dozen years with McConnell, told [biographer] MacGillis that fund-raising was “a joy to him,” adding, “He gets a twinkle in his eye and his step quickens. I mean, he loves it.” McConnell’s donors have found themselves rewarded. ...
…
… In 2000, Jack Spadaro, an engineer for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, began conducting an investigation in Martin County, Kentucky, after a slurry pond owned by Massey Energy burst open, releasing three hundred million gallons of lavalike coal waste that killed more than a million fish and contaminated the water systems of nearly thirty thousand people. Spadaro and his team were working on a report that documented eight apparent violations of the law, which could have led to charges of criminal negligence and cost Massey hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. But, that November, George W. Bush was elected President, and he soon named [Elaine] Chao [McConnell’s future wife] his Labor Secretary, giving her authority over the Mine Safety and Health Administration. She chose McConnell’s former chief of staff, Steven Law, as her chief of staff. Spadaro told me, “Law had his finger in everything, and was truly running the Labor Department. He was Mitch’s guy.” The day Bush was sworn in, Spadaro was ordered to halt his investigation. Before the Labor Department issued any fines, Massey made a hundred-thousand-dollar donation to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. McConnell himself had run the unit, which raises funds for Senate campaigns, between 1997 and 2000.
Massey ended up paying only fifty-six hundred dollars in federal fines.
…
… He [Spadaro] noted, “Massey gave a lot of money to McConnell over the years. McConnell’s very bright. He took the money and, in return, protected the coal industry. He’s truly the most corrupt politician in the U.S.” Records show that, between 1990 and 2010, McConnell was the recipient of the second-largest amount of federal campaign donations from people and pacs associated with Massey. And when McConnell ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee it took in five hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars from the coal industry.
…
As a backbench senator, McConnell used his fund-raising talents to rise in the Party’s leadership—a path laid out by Lyndon Johnson. Robert A. Caro, the author of a magisterial four-volume biography of Johnson, told me that, “in a stroke of genius,” Johnson, as a Democratic junior congressman, “realizes he has no power, but he has something no other congressman has—the oilmen and big contractors in Texas who need favors in Washington.” By establishing control over the distribution of the donors’ money, Johnson acquired immense power over his peers. …
According to Keith Runyon [editor for The Courier-Journal], McConnell was focused on his political survival from the moment he arrived in Washington. He recalls that, the morning after McConnell was first sworn in to the Senate, McConnell told him that he would be moving to the right from then on, to keep getting re-ëlected. McConnell has denied saying so, but Runyon told me, “He is a flat-out liar.” Another acquaintance who has known McConnell for years said that, “to the extent that he’s conversational, he wore his ambition to become Majority Leader on his sleeve.”
McConnell envied better-known colleagues who were chased down the corridors by news reporters. He wanted to be like them, he later told Carl Hulse, a Times correspondent, who interviewed McConnell for his book “Confirmation Bias,” about fights over Supreme Court nominees. The way McConnell ended up making his name was decidedly unglamorous: blocking campaign-finance reform. Even he derided the subject as rivaling “static cling as an issue most Americans care about.” Dull as campaign financing was, it was vitally important to his peers, and to democracy. Few members wanted to risk appearing corrupt, and so they were grateful to McConnell for fighting one reform after the next—while claiming that it was purely about defending the First Amendment. According to MacGillis, behind closed doors McConnell admitted to his Senate colleagues that undoing the reforms was “in the best interest of Republicans.” Armed with funding from such billionaire conservatives as the DeVos family, McConnell helped take the quest to kill restraints on spending all the way to the Supreme Court. In 2010, his side won: the Citizens United decision opened the way for corporations, big donors, and secretive nonprofits to pour unlimited and often untraceable cash into elections.
“McConnell loves money, and abhors any controls on it,” Fred Wertheimer, the president of Democracy 21, a group that supports campaign-finance reform, said. “Money is the central theme of his career. And, if you want to control Congress, the best way is to control the money.”
Between 1984, when McConnell was first elected to the Senate, and today, the amount of money spent on federal campaigns has increased at least sixfold, excluding outside spending, more and more of which comes from very rich donors. Influence-peddling has grown from a grubby, shameful business into a multi billion-dollar, high-paying industry. McConnell has led the way in empowering those private interests, and in aligning the Republican Party with them. His staff embodied “the revolving door,” as they went from working for one of America’s poorest states to lobbying for America’s richest corporations, while growing rich themselves and helping fund McConnell’s campaigns. Money from the coal industry, tobacco companies, Big Pharma, Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, and many other interests flowed into Republican coffers while McConnell blocked federal actions that those interests opposed: climate-change legislation, affordable health care, gun control, and efforts to curb economic inequality.
McConnell, like L.B.J., used fund-raising to help allies and punish enemies. “What he’s done behind the scenes is apply the thing that speaks louder in Washington, D.C., than anything else—money,” [Rick] Wilson, the former Republican consultant, said. “Suddenly, Susan Collins gets a bridge in Maine. Lisa Murkowski suddenly gets a harbor. Oh, what a coincidence!” McConnell has a brilliant grasp of his caucus members’ needs, and he helps them protect their seats with tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations and federal grants … (Mayer 15-20).
Works cited:
Isquith, Elias. "You Think We’re This Dumb?": Inside the Sick, Cynical Mind of Mitch McConnell.” Salon, October 1, 2014. Net. https://www.salon.com/2014/10/01/you_think_we%E2%80%99re_this_dumb_inside_the_sick_cynical_mind_of_mitch_mcconnell/
Mayer, Jane. “How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief.” The New Yorker, April 20, 2020. Net. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-mitch-mcconnell-became-trumps-enabler-in-chief
Moser, Bob. “Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America.” Rolling Stone, September 17, 2019. Net. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/mitch-mcconnell-man-who-sold-america-880799/
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