MacGillis Alec - The cynic: the political education of Mitch McConnell

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Praise for

THE CYNIC

While MacGillis writes with the passion of a convert, he isnt some liberal hack whom Republicans can coolly dismiss. He is a thorough and well-trained reporter happily unburdened from the dispassionate constraints of he-said-she-said journalism.... In The Cynic, MacGillis constructs his profile around interviews with long-lost friends, colleagues and enemiesmore than 75 of them for this slim volumewho have known the subject since their provincial early days.

The Washington Post

The best portrait of McConnell.

NationalJournal.com

Not many people have a clear idea of who McConnell is, or how he evolved, or why he does the things he does.... This is the story Alec MacGillis tells in his concise, fast-moving [book] about McConnell, The Cynic. Its full of things I hadnt known.... He also helps explain how someone without the obvious political gifts of speechmaking or glad-handing has stayed in national office for 30 years and is favored to be there at least six years more. And if youd like even more firsthand evidence of what has happened to the Senate, youll find it hereall in less than two hours reading time.

James Fallows

MacGilliss book serves as a great reminder of how McConnell became the Senate leader he is todayand how much every elected official tends to change the more they learn about Washington and their polarized constituents.

TheWashingtonPost.com

As Alec MacGilliss excellent new book on McConnell makes clear, the Kentucky senators top priority has always been not ideology but his own political advancement and survival.

TheAtlantic.com

The Cynic is based on interviews with more than seventy-five people who have worked alongside Mitch McConnell or otherwise interacted with him over the course of his career. McConnell declined to be interviewed, as did his wife, Elaine Chao. Many of the McConnell remarks and observations quoted in the book are derived from John David Dyches authorized 2009 biography of McConnell, Republican Leader . Dyche interviewed McConnell for his book and also was granted access to oral history interviews that McConnell gave over the years to John Kleber, a Kentucky historian. Other books helpful in researching this book include Geoffrey Kabaservices Rule and Ruin, Robert A. Caros Master of the Senate , Gabriel Shermans The Loudest Voice in the Room, and Norman Ornstein and Thomas Manns Its Even Worse Than It Looks. Among the many articles that informed the book were Clara Binghams 2005 piece in Washington Monthly on the Martin County slurry spill, Phillip Babichs 2003 piece on the same subject in Salon, John Judiss 2001 piece in the New Republic on McConnells relations with China, John Chevess 2006 series in the Lexington Herald-Leader on McConnells interactions with campaign donors, Joshua Greens 2011 profile of McConnell in the Atlantic , and Jason Cherkis and Zach Carters 2013 profile of him in The Huffington Post . The book is also indebted to the daily beat reporting of Capitol Hill veterans such as the Washington Post s Paul Kane, the New York Times Carl Hulse, and the Louisville Courier-Journal s James R. Carroll, among others.

The author made two reporting trips to Kentucky in the course of researching the book, to western Kentucky in August 2013 and Louisville and eastern Kentucky in April 2014.

The young man seemed hopeless. He was an underwhelming specimen, with a wan complexion, thin lips, and doughy features, as well as a slight limp, the legacy of a childhood bout with polio. Doesnt make a dominant physical presentation, was how the pollster, Tully Plesser, put it years later. He wasnt like a mans man, really, said the ad maker, Bob Goodman. The candidate was even less commanding in his speech, with none of the rhetorical vigor expected of politicians in Appalachia and the upland South. And he offered precious little material for the image shapers: the son of a middle manager, not even a native of the state in which he was running for office, with nothing in his background but a few years of low-level lawyering and Washington paper-shuffling. He isnt interesting. He doesnt have an aura, an air of mystery about him, said Goodman, the man charged with conjuring something out of these paltry fixings.

Yet in another light, Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. was an ideal project. For one, he was unburdened by any illusions about his shortcomings.

For another, he wanted to win.

And so the young man submitted to the consultants instructions like no candidate they had known. He was wonderful, said Goodman. He was like a kid doing a new thing. He was very easy to deal with. He was like the kid who never was in the school play, who really didnt have talent that way, but was very willing to do the things asked of him. Said Plesser: We didnt have to deal with the ego. Mitch was the best client to have. He really listened, he didnt argue.... We were absolutely starting from scratch. We could build something just the way we wanted, with no pushback. And when the candidate proceeded to exceed the low expectations others had for himfinally nailing the clip on the seventh or eighth takehe glowed with gratification, said Goodman: He appreciated a compliment: You did that great! It was like the kid who says, Gosh, I really can do the school play. One of the guys on the film crew came up with a behind-his-back nickname for the eager striver: Love-me-love-me .

The challenge was obvious, said Goodman. Being dramatic was not his style. We saw it as his weakness as a politician and we said, How do we take this fellow who doesnt do all the political things and endear him to a constituency that just wants to talk common sense? How do we lighten him up and make him human, reach the human feelings of hope and love? He was open to that, because he recognized that wasnt his strength.

The consultants did their job, and their man won, narrowly defeating the incumbent Democrat to become, in 1978, the head of government for Jefferson County, Kentucky, which includes Louisville. To their astonishment, he did not stop there. This man so ill-suited to the business of running for elected office went on to knock off an incumbent U.S. senator in 1984, becoming the first Republican to win statewide in Kentucky in sixteen years, and then to win reelection four times, and then to find himself in 2014 on the verge of achieving what fairly early in his ascent he had identified as his lifes dream: Senate majority leader.

But it was not just their former clients climb up the ladder that startled the consultants. It was the way his ascent transformed him. The guileless young man who was conspicuously uninformed about the mechanics of politics grew into a steely influence broker, proud of his growing sway on Capitol Hill. More than that, what struck Goodman was how his former client was using that powerto obstruct the agenda of President Barack Obama and, with it, the workings of the federal government. The young man who had run in Louisville as a pragmatic moderatewho had won the endorsement of the AFL-CIO by supporting collective bargaining for public employees, who had earned the gratitude of local feminists by standing up for abortion rightswas now the symbol of the willful intransigence that had brought the nations capital to the brink of utter dysfunction. And this change pained Bob Goodman.