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Jewish World Review March 5, 2002 / 21 Adar, 5762

Fred Barnes

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The Senate's new Mr. Conservative


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THIS is a moment of defeat for Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. But he's hardly in agony. He concedes campaign finance reform, which he's been fighting in one form or another for more than a decade, will soon be enacted. Yet he struggles on. At best, he can hold up the legislation for a few weeks, time enough, he thinks, to gain a few small concessions from its sponsors. Once the measure is signed by President Bush, he promises to be plaintiff number one in a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality. Sure, the media will again denounce McConnell. "I enjoy their ire," he says.

McConnell's role in the Senate--indeed, inside the Republican party and among conservatives--is growing. He's now "counselor" to Senate GOP leader Trent Lott. He attends leadership meetings and offers advice on strategy. Later this year, he's likely to win the post of Republican whip, replacing Don Nickles of Oklahoma, who's term-limited in the post. He's running against Larry Craig of Idaho, but McConnell's allies insist he's already lined up enough votes. If so, he'll give Senate Republicans a second-in-command who's as combative and relentless as House GOP whip Tom DeLay.

McConnell's rise is remarkable in a number of ways. He's known far more for what he opposes than for what he favors. In fact, he's not identified with any particular initiative. Rather than "growing" in the eyes of the Washington establishment since he was first elected in 1984--which means drifting to the left--McConnell has become more conservative. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina once feared McConnell would be a tepid defender of the tobacco industry. As it turned out, he's ferocious in fighting the anti-tobacco lobby. McConnell is anything but a darling of the media. The wall of his Senate office is covered with dozens of hostile cartoons from newspapers. "I'm proud of my enemies," McConnell says. "I wouldn't trade them for anything." Nor is McConnell the most popular Republican among his peers. "He's something of an acquired taste," says former senator Slade Gorton of Washington state.

There are basically five criteria for being an effective conservative leader in Congress, and McConnell, like DeLay, meets all five. One, you must be a principled conservative, not just temperamentally or situationally conservative. Two, you must be unaffected by sharply critical press coverage, even oblivious to it. Three, you must be willing and sometimes eager to take on unpopular causes. Four, you must find satisfaction in blocking bad legislation, using any parliamentary tools available. And five, you must have the ability to build coalitions.

When McConnell arrived in Washington after upsetting Democratic Sen. Dee Huddleston, he was largely an unknown quantity to conservatives. He wasn't viewed as a future leader. McConnell says he's "always been well right of center," but he acknowledges his years in Congress have also had an effect. "When you witness so many bad ideas gain steam, it does have a tendency to make you more conservative." Helms, for one, soon saw McConnell as someone who would "advance in the leadership." McConnell did, only gradually. He chaired the ethics and commerce committees, ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans, from 1996 to 2000, then became Lott's adviser. McConnell is expected to win reelection easily in November.

McConnell's relationship with the media is mostly adversarial. He's feuded with his hometown paper, the Louisville Courier-Journal, over fund-raising for the McConnell Center for Political Leadership at the University of Louisville, his alma mater, and connections his wife, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, has with China. "He's not a publicity hound of any kind," says Gorton. But neither is he like Helms or President Reagan in their knack for ignoring the press. "They actually didn't read the press," McConnell says. "I read it and enjoy it, but I'm unfazed by it." This, of course, is empowering, allowing him to take strong conservative positions without fretting about press coverage. In fact, McConnell says he takes "perverse pleasure" in alienating the media on campaign finance reform.

And not only on campaign reform. McConnell is a magnet for unpopular causes--or at least causes the mainstream media dislike. He's pro-tobacco, pro-gun, pro-business, skeptical of environmental regulation and election reform. His signature issue is campaign restrictions, contesting them. He first delved into the subject while teaching a night course in American political parties in the mid-1970s. "I've had both an academic and practical interest in this," McConnell says. When he got to Washington, he quickly realized he knew more about the subject than anyone else. "And often," he says, "knowledge is power."

McConnell's zeal in opposing campaign finance reform has never slackened. In 1990, while he was running for reelection, he led a successful Senate filibuster against a reform bill. He was warned this would hurt him politically. But he won, 52 percent to 48 percent, and came away convinced that fighting campaign finance reform is risk-free. "Nobody in American politics has ever won or lost an election on this issue," McConnell insists. Just before the 1994 election, after reform bills had passed both houses, he put together a GOP filibuster of the resolution naming conferees to a House-Senate session to meld the two measures. It worked, the bills died, and several weeks later Republicans won their most sweeping victory in congressional elections in the second half of the twentieth century.

Even in defeat this year, McConnell gets credit for warding off a far more sweeping version of campaign finance reform. The 1994 bill would have instituted public financing of congressional races and put stiffer limits on independent issue ads. The bill President Bush will sign is far less comprehensive and is studded with loopholes. Also, McConnell has stacked the Federal Election Commission with anti-reform Republicans. He overcame the opposition of President Clinton and Senate Democrats to win an FEC seat for the brightest intellectual foe of campaign reform, a young Harvard Law School graduate named Bradley Smith.

McConnell delights in thwarting liberal legislation. He doesn't accept "the notion my career should be measured by how many bills I get passed. I think stopping bad legislation is an important part of being a U.S. senator." He's proud to have joined Phil Gramm of Texas in defeating President Clinton's health care plan in 1994. He's happy to have watered down the patients' bill of rights that cleared the Senate. "It doesn't bother me to use parliamentary tools to stop bad things from happening," he says. "I take more pleasure in the things we've prevented from happening" than in those which passed.

What distinguishes McConnell from many conservatives in Congress is his skill in patching together coalitions. "You can't [block bad legislation] by yourself," he says. "You have to inspire the loyalty of others." Even as campaign finance reform nears final passage, McConnell has collected enough senators to demand time for negotiations on small but important changes. (He lacked the votes to obstruct the bill.) And when Democrats sought to gut antifraud provisions in the separate election reform bill last week, he and Kit Bond of Missouri organized a filibuster to counter them.

The retirement of Gramm and Helms later this year makes McConnell's role all the more significant. McConnell says he's not as "hard-core" as Helms, and he's more selective in picking targets than Gramm. Nonetheless, he'll become the most important conservative in the Senate in impeding liberal legislation. The good news is Sen. John McCain, McConnell's opponent on campaign reform, was correct in his assessment of McConnell last week. "There are few things more daunting in politics," he said, "than the determined opposition of Sen. McConnell."



Fred Barnes is Executive editor at the Weekly Standard. Comment by clicking here.

Up

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09/17/01: W. Stands for War: A new beginning for the Bush presidency
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08/29/01: Jesse Helms's America
08/14/01: The Impresario: Karl Rove, Orchestrator of the Bush White House
08/07/01: The new conventional political wisdom
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