GOP leader holds key to party's agenda

"I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky."

- Abraham Lincoln

Which is how discerning conservatives felt while waiting to see if, in Election Day's second-most important voting, Kentuckians would grant a fifth term to Mitch McConnell, leader of the Senate Republicans. They did, making him Washington's most important Republican and second-most consequential elected official. This apotheosis has happened even though he is handicapped by, as National Review rather cruelly says, "an owlish, tight-lipped public demeanor reminiscent of George Will."

That disability is, however, a strength because it precludes an occupational hazard of senators - presidential ambition.

Democrats spared no expense in attempting to unhorse him, recruiting a rich opponent and supplementing his spending with $6 million from the national party. McConnell had made himself vulnerable by opposing the "Millionaire's Amendment" to the McCain-Feingold law restricting political speech.

McConnell, 66, is a constitutionalist who has opposed McCain-Feingold and other abridgments of free speech, including the proposed constitutional amendment to ban the expressive act of flag burning.

Speaking last week by telephone from Kentucky, McConnell said Republicans should feel "disappointment, not despair." In comprehensively adverse conditions - "the worst since the Depression" - their presidential candidate nevertheless won 46 percent of the vote. Although 23 percent of Barack Obama's voters were under 30, McConnell does not subscribe to "as the twig is bent" determinism. ("Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined" - Alexander Pope.) He does not think the younger generation has acquired an indelible Democratic imprint.

Ninety percent of John McCain's vote was white, and the white percentage of the turnout has fallen from 90 percent in 1976 to 77 percent in 2004 and 74 percent in 2008. Still, McConnell believes that although Hispanics, the nation's largest minority, gave Obama two-thirds of their votes, they are entrepreneurial and culturally conservative and therefore not beyond the reach of Republicans.

Legislatively, Republicans can begin clarifying their convictions by pressing to limit the scope and duration of what a Republican administration has unleashed - the increasingly indiscriminate intrusion of government into financing the private sector. McConnell believes the bailout legislation should be considered a one-time response to a once-in-a-century crisis, and should be terminated "as soon as possible" by government selling the assets it has acquired in order to recoup the money it has spent.

He has urged Obama to "tackle the big issues - Social Security, Medicare - that cannot be addressed without some kind of bipartisan buy-in."

Democrats probably can peel off a few Republican senators to reach 60 votes for some of their agenda. But not for all of it, which actually should please President Obama. For example, McConnell's caucus probably can stop organized labor's top priority - abolition of workers' right to a secret ballot in unionization votes. Obama has endorsed this travesty but might prudently hope it never reaches his desk.

McConnell is Kentucky's most important politician since Henry Clay, "the Great Compromiser." Clay's attempts to defuse the sectional crisis rooted in slavery failed, but they bought time for Northern strength - in population and industrial muscle - to become sufficient to save the nation. McConnell, too, has the patience that politics repays and that the Republican recuperation might require.

But he also has a keen sense of how the nation "can change on a dime." Drawing upon this year's grim experience, he dryly says: "Governing is a hazardous business for presidential parties."

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group