I always hear about how savvy and competent McConnell is, and was just wondering how so. He has certainly been willing to obliterate norms and resort to underhanded tactics, but a willingness to take the low road doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a sharp operator. I’m not doubting this evaluation of McConnell’s abilities, I’m just wondering when/where he has shown particularly good political maneuvering. Thanks!
He mainly obstructs, only preventing the senate from doing anything unless the Republican constituency and/or the party financiers are heavily in favor of it. He also recognizes the many weaknesses of the Democrats, mainly related to their inability to cooperate and their fear of offending their own constituents.
It’s the same ability any good politician has, reading the room and counting votes, except that it’s much easier with his approach of doing as little as possible.
You already nailed it without realizing it. His willingness to take the low road is what makes him a genius. Until he came along the senate majority leader did not do things like hold up SCOTUS nominations for partisan gain. McConnell knew that he could do that and get away with it, thus the genius of his tactics.
Old story about two football managers (soccer). One had great tactics and his players played sublime and beautiful football. Won the square root of fuck all. The other played a ruthless, physical and simple game. Very ugly to watch. Had an overflowing trophy cabinet.
The moral of the story is that results matter. Same in politics. Getting outcomes you want is the ultimate aim. Winning ugly matters less u5han winning.
Yeah, but winning the game is pointless if you burn down the stadium.
For Republicans of today, that is a feature, not a bug.
I don’t accept the label of genius, I do bestow the label of rat cunning.
+1
Politics is the art of the possible.
To make things impossible for your opposition counts as a resounding win in most, if not all, political jurisdictions
Not if you don’t accept the premise that there needs to be a stadium.
The old “I just want to shrink it [the US government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” viewpoint
I’ve always understood that there were byzantine internal rules for each house, which some of the more elder members knew how to manipulate. Maybe he is of that sort.
But I think his main “genius” is being from a safe state, which gave him seniority. I’m sure he has a strong history of rewarding the craven and punishing the independent. Combine that with a ruthless pursuit of party advantage with ZERO consideration of public interest, and there you have it.
I would think there must be more to it than that. A willingness to take the low road for political gain isn’t genius, it’s just shamelessness in the service of expediency. I suppose one could argue that it was a sharp reading of the political winds to foresee that such tactics wouldn’t result in backlash from his party, but I don’t think he needed a crystal ball to see that.
He is no genius. He’s just good at exploiting the rules when it benefits him and changing the rules when that benefits him. He is singularly focused on bringing one-party rule to the US and doesn’t give a damn about fair debate and due process. He is a monster, not a genius.
I don’t see them as mutually exclusive. One has to do with morality, the other with talent.
Yes, Mitch McConnell is a horrible human being. But I still have a perverse admiration for his skill in playing the black pieces.
One major insight of his is that there isn’t a big news story - and definitely not an ongoing story - to be made out of doing nothing. There’s not going to be a “the House passed the Miraculously Solves All Our Problems Bill eight months ago, and the Senate still refuses to act on it” story. The only way it can become a story is if enough people are out there agitating for passage of the Miraculously Solves All Our Problems Bill, angrily questioning Senators about it at town halls and the like, and probably not even then. And Mitch knows that. So when Nancy Pelosi shepherds 142 terrific bills through the House, he knows there’s no political cost to ignoring them.
This was particularly noticeable when he sat on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Before too long, it just drifted right out of the news. By mid-2016, Senate was still ignoring Merrick Garland, Generalissimo Francisco Franco was still dead, and both stories were equally newsworthy.
His skills lie entirely in his lack of moral conscience. He knows what the right thing to do is and instinctively acts against anything that will seem in any way bi-partisan – traditional norms and greater good be damned. He’s figured out that strength does not lie in compromise . It lies in the ability to wield power. He is Machiavelli, incarnate. Once he loses his power, having spent all his political capital and broken more than he can ever recant or repair, he will step down and disappear from the public arena entirely. Not in shame but in sullen victory.
I think this was partly Obama’s and Democrat’s negligence. He should have spent his last year in office shouting bloody murder from his bully pulpit. Democrats should have organized mass rallies at McConnell’s house to protest. Instead, we got “Well they’re gonna fuck us over but what ya gonna do?”
I agree that that was partly Obama’s negligence. There weren’t going to be any mass rallies for Garland. Who, of the sort who might be arsed to participate in a protest of any sort, would have cared all that much about him?
Now if he’d nominated someone who progressives passionately supported (Elizabeth Warren might’ve been good), that might’ve happened. But he went with a judge that the GOP claimed to be OK with. Oops.
I think **RTFirefly **hit a point, which is that not even Democrats themselves were enthused about Garland, a moderate. If Obama wanted to fire up his base, he could have picked a deep-blue justice to replace Scalia (who still would have stood zero chance of getting past McConnell) but at least the Democrats would have cared about.
McConnell, IMO, is a very successful sociopath. He lies constantly, tears down societies old standards, has no empathy but is very efficient at his job. He has blocked pretty much every bill the democrats proposed.
The only time he kind of got outsmarted was when McCain didn’t vote for the skinny repeal for the ACA. But then I think they just put it in the supply side tax cut and got it passed that way.
He’s sharper at (A) finding a lower road, and (B) exploiting our reluctance to believe he will actually go that low, and (C) understanding that this is what his constituency wants.
This will stop seeming clever once there are no lower roads to take, or the Democrats start expecting his callow shenanigans, or his constituency stops buying it. Then we’ll just remember him for being the guy who lowered the bar.
You ever hear about how many conservative judges Trump has appointed? McConnell deserves at least half of the responsibility for that. Trump proposes, but McConnell implements. That’s his real genius.
Here’s a series of charts comparing recent presidents and their judicial nominees at the same point in each administration.
This has similar but somewhat different information, arranged somewhat differently.
This.
I’m uncomfortable with calling it “genius” as some have in this thread (and the OP of course).
There’s a certain level of smarts required for achieving what McConnell has, sure.
But a bigger part of why other leaders have not done what he’s done, is simply that they were capable of feeling guilt, or shame. Or they felt any degree of obligation to fulfill their official duties to the electorate / constitution.
For your other point, I’m more interested in wondering what is going to happen to the senate. People have said for years that the senate does not get enough done, but geez, it’s a joke now. You may as well replace it with a road block and a TV showing fox and friends on a loop.
Genius would mean that, in his particular area, he has some ideas that are both really good, and that other people haven’t thought of. I don’t think he has that. He has ideas people thought of, but dismissed because they had different moral priorities.
It doesn’t take a genius to change the rules to make them work for you when you are in charge of the people who make the rules. It does, however, take a certain kind of ruthlessness to be willing to break everything. It requires not caring about the damage you will do.