What Republicans really need is a strong leader with good political instincts and none of Trump’s baggage or indiscipline.
The great baseball writer Bill James grew up as a fan of the Kansas City A’s, a franchise that had a losing record in each of the 13 seasons it spent in Kansas City. Writing their history in 1986, he observed, “Bad organizations will tend to project their weaknesses onto their best players, and ultimately will dwell not on what the player can do, but on what he can’t.” I have always taken that observation to heart in politics: A political party or coalition can only win as a team, and a winning team gets the most out of what people can do, while minimizing how much it asks people to do what they can’t. A losing one points fingers at accomplished people for their limitations.
That is the spirit in which I have long evaluated Mitch McConnell and his critics. On the positive side of the ledger, McConnell is a master tactician of Senate inside baseball. When he wants to get something done or prevent the other side from doing it, he knows all the angles. His handling of the judicial-confirmation wars over the past decade has been nothing short of brilliant, and is why he is so floridly hated on the Left. As I noted after the Dobbs decision, without McConnell and his caucus, there is no vacancy for Trump to fill with Neil Gorsuch, no confirmation for Brett Kavanaugh after the accusation, and no vote on Amy Coney Barrett before the election: “All nine of the justices who decided Roe were confirmed by a Democratic Senate. Seven of the nine justices who decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 were originally confirmed to the Court by a Democratic Senate (William Rehnquist was elevated to chief justice by a Republican Senate in 1986). The current Court, by contrast, contains five justices confirmed by a Republican Senate (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett). Four of those five were in today’s majority, and the fifth concurred in the judgment. That made all the difference.” It is not just McConnell’s appearance that gets him compared with a turtle: He has the slow and steady virtues of the tortoise in Aesop’s fable, winning races that require patience and stalling. Despite his advanced age (he’s 80), time has taken less out of McConnell than out of many of his contemporaries in national politics.
As a caucus leader, McConnell does the three essential parts of the job of managing his people: He knows how far they will go, he almost always gets them to stick together once a decision is made, and they know that he has their back — even to a fault, as we have seen repeatedly in his often-unrequited loyalty to Lisa Murkowski. McConnell is capable of principled stands, as we saw in his impassioned speech on the morning of January 6 in favor of rejecting Donald Trump’s bogus challenge to the election, and in McConnell’s denunciation of Trump following the Capitol riot. But he will not cast lonely votes of principled protest; when his caucus wasn’t willing to impeach Trump over January 6, McConnell used his voice to side with his conscience, but used his vote and his mastery of the rules to side with his caucus.
McConnell is a better Republican leader in the Senate than anyone in at least the past half century, and he brings more to the table than any leader of the House Republicans in that time. A winning team can make great use of such a man. A losing team, especially one desperate (as the Kansas City A’s were under Charlie Finley) to deflect criticism from the insecure egomaniac at the top, will instead vent at a man such as McConnell for what he can’t do.
Even as we acknowledge McConnell’s value to the team and observe the real agenda of people who blame McConnell in order to exonerate Trump, however, we should not be blind to the things McConnell can’t do. The tortoise cannot be the hare. He is rarely a good public spokesman, and is as deeply unpopular with the general public outside his home state as any other caucus leader in recent years. Aside from a few pet issues, such as opposing campaign finance reform, he has no public policy vision; at best, he can carry out the agendas of other people. That requires the Republican Party to be led by a serious policy mind in tune with what its voters want, instead of by John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump. Paul Ryan is really the only national Republican leader of the post-Bush era who had a positive policy vision, and Ryan and his agenda had their own flaws. As a matter of electoral tactics, McConnell has a point that running on pure opposition in a midterm year is shrewder than rolling out plans that spook the swing voters, but if the party does that year after year, people start to wonder what it does stand for.
McConnell has also long been the bête noire of small-government conservatives, who spent much of the Tea Party era rightly furious that Mitch would rather cut big-spending deals than hold out for cuts. It is ironic that many of his current critics are the same people who cheered Trump and derided small-government conservatism and Ryan’s concern with debt and entitlements as “Zombie Reaganism,” but McConnell is still part of the swamp when it comes to spending. True, he successfully played a weak hand in 2021-22 in keeping Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on his side against the worst excesses of Joe Biden’s orgy of money-printing and against progressive plans to abolish the filibuster and remake American government on a narrow party-line vote, but McConnell gave away a good deal in order to accomplish that, got played by Manchin in the run-up to the Inflation Reduction Act, and is now going along with an excessive omnibus spending bill that goes much further than needed in order to just keep the government funded while Kevin McCarthy gets his own caucus in line.
That brings us to the latest dustup. McConnell has, quite correctly, complained that the main problem for Republicans in 2022 was the poor candidates selected by Donald Trump, rather than turnout or the Republican agenda, and the number two problem was that Trump himself turned off so many independent voters and even some Republican voters. (Rick Scott, who tried to roll out his own agenda, ended up instead giving talking points the Democrats used to hammer Republican candidates to paint them as enemies of Social Security.)
McConnell now says that he will “actively look for quality candidates” to support in the 2024 Senate primaries. He is right that there is an important role for Republican leadership to play in persuading better people to run, offering voters more head-to-head choices and fewer divided fields, and ultimately helping persuade them to stop backing Trumpy and Trump-backed losers such as Blake Masters, Herschel Walker, Don Bolduc, Dr. Oz, Kari Lake, Doug Mastriano, Darren Bailey, Dan Cox, Joe Kent, and the rest. But history tells us that McConnell is the wrong man for that role. He is a poor judge of political talent: His picks were repeatedly rejected by primary voters during the Tea Party era, and he even talked Trump into backing electoral losers such as Luther Strange in Alabama. McConnell has his own self-interest to worry about: He wants people who not only support his continuation as Republican leader in the Senate, but who will go along with the caucus. The very inside-baseball, caucus-loyalty skills that make Mitch an effective leader within the Senate are impediments to judging how candidates will play on the hustings. Moreover, the visible backing of McConnell makes it easy to pillory perfectly good Republican candidates as tools of an “establishment” that doesn’t actually run much these days.
What Republicans really need is a strong leader with good political instincts and none of Trump’s baggage or indiscipline. They are not there yet. But in looking to counter Trump’s baleful influence in Republican primaries, McConnell should have the humility to recognize that this is one race the tortoise should sit out.