WASHINGTON — Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has nearly within his grasp the job he’s dreamed for decades of achieving, that of majority leader of the U.S. Senate.

The Republicans appear likely to seize control of the Senate from the Democrats in the Nov. 4 midterm elections. If that happens and McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican, wins his own race for re-election, he is expected to ascend to lead the Senate.

“There’s no question that this is the ultimate goal of his life,” said former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. “He’ll want to do something with it if he gets it.”

McConnell is asserting a “great likelihood” that he will be majority leader and is using it as a reason voters should choose him in his close race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, saying recently, “The majority leader gets to set the agenda not only for the country but to look after Kentucky’s interests.”

“Every senator has one vote,” he recently told a Kentucky crowd. “But every senator doesn’t have equal influence.”

There are big questions, though, about which version of McConnell would show up to lead the Senate: the pragmatic deal maker or the partisan whose feuds the past several years with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., have helped define the most dysfunctional Congress of modern times.

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There are also doubts about how effective McConnell could be at getting any agenda through. He likely would be running a Senate with just a razor-thin Republican majority, riven by internal divisions between tea party acolytes and centrists.

Even if McConnell can somehow keep the Senate Republicans united, they still won’t have the 60 votes needed to defeat a Democratic filibuster and get major legislation through – much less the 67 votes to override a veto by President Obama.

“Other than maybe the Keystone pipeline, what else can McConnell and Republicans really do?” asked Tripp Baird, a former strategist at the conservative Heritage Action for America.

A worry for conservatives, he said, is whether McConnell would shift into the deal maker role and end up doing “what Democrats want them to do and call it a victory.”

McConnell, 72, is a creature of the Senate. While in college he interned for a Kentucky senator, then worked as an aide for another, and then spent the past 30 years there after winning his first election by just four-tenths of a percentage point. Taciturn, with a poker face that’s impossible to read, McConnell is known as a skilled tactician and, until the election of Obama at least, as more a pragmatist than a partisan.

“If you look over McConnell’s legislative history, he’s usually been more comfortable as the inside deal maker,” said Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky.

That included crafting deals with Reid for major legislation such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which helped save the financial industry in 2008, and assistance for the beleaguered auto industry.

But as the Reid-McConnell relationship degenerated into bitter personal attacks in recent years, there was little compromising in the Senate and not much accomplished. Even deals between McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden, to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” and default on the debt, took the nation to the brink and were more temporary reprieves than grand bargain.

McConnell, as Republican minority leader, transformed how the rules are used in the Senate through “the use of the filibuster as a weapon of mass obstruction,” said Norm Ornstein, a centrist scholar on politics and Congress at the American Enterprise Institute.


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