Bill Straub: McConnell may have won the politics, but not when it came to blocking Obama’s agenda

WASHINGTON – The second session of the 114th Congress just underway presents the American public with a final look – thankfully — at one of the most contentious and exasperating political face-offs in the nation’s long history, pitting President Obama against Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell, the dour lawmaker from Louisville who forever looks like he is sucking on a pickle, has worked assiduously over the past seven years to destroy the Obama presidency and there is no reason to believe, with his party commanding the majority in the upper chamber, that he will ease off the accelerator as Obama enjoys, if that’s the proper term for it, his final year in the White House.

It was McConnell who rather infamously in 2010 publicly averred that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” And it was Obama who, during the 2013 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, having nonetheless won a second term, joked, “Some folks still think I don’t spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you have a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really? Why don’t YOU get a drink with Mitch McConnell.’’

Obviously this is not a Romeo and Juliet relationship. It’s more reminiscent of Julius Caesar and Cassius.

Despite Mitch McConnell’s effort, President Obama has somehow managed to preside over one of the most consequential administrations in American history (White House Photo)

McConnell’s camp and the White House continue to maintain that interactions between the two men remain “cordial’’ – which is Washington-speak for saying they have thus far refrained from spitting in each other’s face. Truth be known, it’s obvious from comments and reports that McConnell has zero respect for Obama, dating back to the latter’s short stay in the Senate representing Illinois before moving to Pennsylvania Avenue.

For his part, Obama has viewed McConnell as little more than an irritant and implemented much of his agenda despite the Kentuckian’s ongoing obstruction – something that has annoyed McConnell no end, especially when it comes to the environment.

Part of the conflict stems from personality. Obama is the urban pol from Chicago who operates on good humor and soaring rhetoric that can, on occasion, prove inspiring. McConnell, representing a commonwealth of small towns and rural roots, is calculating, serious as a heart attack and views the president as a lightweight.

That oil-and-water mixture has left Congress with an approval rating of 15 percent according to a CBS/New York Times poll released this month with 75 percent of the public voicing its disapproval despite McConnell’s self-serving claims that the upper chamber is “back to work’’ under his leadership. Meanwhile, a Pew Research poll published Jan. 14 places Obama’s approval at 46 percent, while a plurality, 48 percent, disapprove.

Obama has acknowledged that his style is part of the problem. He is not LBJ – a president who is on the phone goading reluctant lawmakers late into the night, inviting them over for bourbon and branch water, socializing, back-slapping and telling lies to get the votes he needs. He is cool and distant, more apt to hold his cards close to the vest.

“It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency – that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better,” Obama said this year in his State of the Union address. “There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”

Obama has met only infrequently with McConnell, which provided the GOP leader with a rationale for obstruction, asserting that the president was never interested in anything that Senate Republicans – in the minority during the first six years of the administration – had to say, forcing the adoption of dilatory tactics.

But real questions exist over whether Obama could have done anything to “bridge the divide’’ with the likes of McConnell, who more than any other lawmaker in recent memory, is responsible for excising the word loyal from the term loyal opposition. He not only has sought to thwart Obama on major initiatives like health care, he has also pushed to deny the president any sense of bipartisanship on even the most innocuous of measures.

Former Sen. George Voinovich, an Ohio Republican who retired in 2011, told Michael Grunwald, author of “The New New Deal,’’ a book about the federal government’s attempt to address the Great Recession, that McConnell from the get-go was determined to deny Obama even a smidgen of GOP support during his White House tenure.

“If he (Obama) was for it, we had to be against it,” Voinovich told Grunwald. “He wanted everyone to hold the fort. All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”

It is a claim McConnell has not even bothered to deny.

“We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals,” McConnell told Politico. “Because we thought — correctly, I think — that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

An easy example of McConnell’s unwillingness to cooperate comes in the area of federal judge nominations. Over most of the nation’s history votes on judicial nominees have been delayed only for the most controversial presidential picks. While serving as minority leader McConnell led a filibuster on almost every nominee – even those that carried the support of GOP home state senators. Many were eventually confirmed unanimously.

McConnell has all but abandoned the age-old process of confirming district court choices as a group, insisting on separate votes for each nominee, slowing the process and filling the docket to block other Obama administration initiatives from being brought up for consideration. As a result, according to judicialnominations.org, there are 55 vacancies on the district court level, resulting in 25 judicial emergencies.

In other words, in addition to attempting to destroy the Obama agenda, McConnell has done, and is doing, great harm to the nation’s judiciary.

So, while Obama at least expressed a desire for some degree of bipartisanship despite his lack of hail-fellow-well-met skills, McConnell was having none of it, which sets him apart. He is lauded in some quarters as a legislative genius. But it should be remembered that his predecessors as minority and majority leader had the same tactics at their disposal and, for the most part, refused to utilize them out of concern over what the resulting strife would do to the country.

The result is a legislative mess resulting in a governmental shutdown and a failure to address many of the ongoing problems of the day. And this being Obama’s final year, with a major November election in the offing, there’s no reason to expect the Senate under McConnell to get off the schneid and do its job.

So what is the result of this conflict? Despite McConnell’s effort, Obama has somehow managed to preside over one of the most consequential administrations in American history. The president succeeded where others had failed, championing and passing a comprehensive national health insurance bill that has become known as Obamacare, providing coverage to millions who had previously gone without. Wall Street reforms were adopted along with the creation of a Consumer Protection Bureau to offset the power of the financial sector.

His stimulus package helped the nation recover from one of the worst recessions in history, with unemployment dropping from 10 percent to five percent. He re-opened the door to Cuba and entered into several important treaties – including one on climate change. And he managed to increase income taxes for households earning $250,000 and more.

McConnell quite literally failed to stop the Obama agenda. Period. But he has won on the politics – the only area he was really interested in anyway.

Republicans control the House and Senate, maintain most of the nation’s governorships and have assumed control over a majority of state legislatures.

For McConnell, the politician’s politician, policy has never been as important as winning and holding power. On that part he has succeeded. And, as usual, it’s the American public that winds up holding the bag.

Washington correspondent Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. He currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.