How the embattled Senate minority leader explains America’s political gridlock (Politico)

[alp227]

For most of Obama’s presidency, McConnell has been the face of Republican obstructionism—never more so than when, in 2010, he declared, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” But this obsession with ending political careers now belongs to the Democrats, who have made McConnell their top target in 2014. “You cannot overstate the enthusiasm for defeating Mitch McConnell,” says the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s Matt Canter. McConnell himself is well aware of the forces gathering against him. “Every liberal in America, every liberal in America, is out to beat us next year,” McConnell told a group of Kentucky supporters in August. Democrats do not disagree with that assessment; they anticipate spending $50 million, or more, to unseat him and have recruited an appealing young challenger.

But there are Republicans who want his scalp too. It is a great irony that even though the obstruction-minded McConnell has vexed the Obama administration more than almost any other Republican has these past five years, he has also been the Democrats’ most productive negotiating partner—cutting last-minute, not-so-grand bargains to raise the debt ceiling in 2011, avert the fiscal cliff early this year and, just last month, reopen the federal government and avoid a default. “Does anyone down there know how to make a deal?” McConnell asked when he called Vice President Joe Biden hours before the fiscal-cliff deadline. For such cooperation, some conservatives have branded him a sellout, and worse. “The senator should be retired,” says Matt Hoskins of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on anti-McConnell TV ads. And for the first time in his six Senate campaigns, McConnell has drawn a serious primary opponent—a Louisville multi-millionaire named Matt Bevin, who has given Tea Partiers the opportunity to make McConnell their top target in 2014 too.

This two-front assault has boxed McConnell into a corner at the most inopportune moment. The midterm elections of 2014, with their combination of open seats and vulnerable Democratic incumbents, had offered him a chance to finally realize his ambition of seizing the Senate majority leader’s office—which, even if it no longer has quite the stature it did when Lyndon Johnson occupied it, would still afford McConnell the most powerful perch of his long political career. In recent years, he had eagerly recruited Republican candidates and plotted their courses to victory—putting his granular knowledge of turnout patterns and media markets at their disposal. But before he could fully execute these grand plans, members of his own party in Congress began acting in ways that made winning back the Senate less possible for the GOP: derailing immigration reform, obsessing over Obamacare, shutting down the government. Suddenly, McConnell, the man no one dared cross, was essentially powerless to stop the hard-liners because of his own political predicament. Never loved, he was now no longer feared.

full: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/get-mitch-mcconnell-99376.html

[IrishAyes]

1. Down with McConnell, I say. Actually, down with the whole sorry lot of them and their spawn.