Conservative Review

The Man from Kentucky
by George Will

“I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”
– Abraham Lincoln

WASHINGTON — Which is how discerning conservatives felt
while waiting to see if, in Election Day’s second-most
important voting, Kentuckians would grant a fifth term to
Mitch McConnell, leader of the Senate Republicans. They
did, making him Washington’s most important Republican and
second-most consequential elected official. This apotheosis
has happened even though he is handicapped by, as National
Review rather cruelly says, “an owlish, tight-lipped public
demeanor reminiscent of George Will.”

That disability is, however, a strength because it
precludes an occupational hazard of senators —
presidential ambition. Besides, McConnell, 66, is
completely a man of the Senate. At 22, he was an intern
for Sen. John Sherman Cooper and went from law school to
the staff of Sen. Marlow Cook. Because McConnell has been
so thoroughly marinated in the institution’s subtle mores
and complex rules, he will wring maximum leverage from
probably 43 Republican votes.

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Which is why Democrats spared no expense in attempting to
unhorse him, recruiting a rich opponent and supplementing
his spending with $6 million from the national party.
McConnell, to his great credit, had made himself vulnerable
by opposing the “Millionaire’s Amendment” to the McCain-
Feingold law restricting political speech. That amendment
punished wealthy, self-financing candidates by allowing
their opponents to spend much more than the law otherwise
allows. Last summer, the Supreme Court struck down the
amendment for the reasons McConnell opposed it, including
this one: Government has no business fine-tuning electoral
competition by equalizing candidates’ abilities to speak.

McConnell opposes public financing of presidential
campaigns on Jeffersonian grounds (”To compel a man to
furnish contributions of money for the propagation of
opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is,” said
Jefferson, “sinful and tyrannical”). McConnell is a
constitutionalist who has opposed McCain-Feingold and
other abridgements of free speech, including the proposed
constitutional amendment to ban the expressive act of flag
burning.

Speaking last week by telephone from Kentucky, McConnell
said Republicans should feel “disappointment, not despair.”
In comprehensively adverse conditions — “the worst since
the Depression” — their presidential candidate neverthe-
less won 46 percent of the vote. Although 23 percent of
Barack Obama’s voters were under 30, McConnell does not
subscribe to “as the twig is bent” determinism. (”Just as
the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined” — Alexander Pope.)
He does not think the younger generation has acquired an
indelible Democratic imprint.

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Ninety percent of John McCain’s vote was white, and the
white percentage of the turnout has fallen from 90 percent
in 1976 to 77 percent in 2004 and 74 percent in 2008.
Still, McConnell believes that although Hispanics, the
nation’s largest minority, gave Obama two-thirds of their
votes, they are entrepreneurial and culturally conservative
and therefore not beyond the reach of Republicans.

Legislatively, Republicans can begin clarifying their
convictions by pressing to limit the scope and duration
of what a Republican administration has unleashed — the
increasingly indiscriminate intrusion of government into
financing the private sector. McConnell believes the
bailout legislation was “necessary but not necessarily
precedential.” It should be considered a one-time response
to a once-in-a-century crisis, and should be terminated
“as soon as possible” by government selling the assets it
has acquired in order to recoup the money it has spent.

“The Senate,” says McConnell, “is a place that brings many
things to the middle, or stops them altogether.” He has
urged the president-elect to “tackle the big issues —
Social Security, Medicare — that cannot be addressed
without some kind of bipartisan buy-in.”

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Democrats probably can peel off a few Republican senators
to reach 60 votes for some of their agenda. But not for
all of it, which actually should please President Obama.
For example, McConnell’s caucus probably can stop organized
labor’s top priority — abolition of workers’ right to a
secret ballot in unionization votes. Obama has endorsed
this travesty but might prudently hope it never reaches
his desk.

McConnell is Kentucky’s most important politician since
Henry Clay, “the Great Compromiser.” Clay’s attempts to
defuse the sectional crisis rooted in slavery failed, but
they bought time for Northern strength — in population
and industrial muscle — to become sufficient to save
the nation. McConnell, too, has the patience that politics
repays and that the Republican recuperation might require.

But he also has a keen sense of how the nation “can change
on a dime.” Drawing upon this year’s grim experience, he
dryly says: “Governing is a hazardous business for
presidential parties.”