After a failed attempt to run for the House of Representatives (he was tossed from the ballot for failing residency requirements), Mitch McConnell’s first real campaign was for judge-executive of Jefferson County, containing (at the time) Louisville and its suburbs. It was 1977, and he was 35. The images collected here offer a portal into a lost political world: a faraway, enchanted realm in which Mitch McConnell sought elected office as a moderate man of the people. If it were possible to travel back in time and preserve this Mitch McConnell in amber and reanimate him intact, as the original imagineers of Jurassic Park did, today’s Republican Party might have become something quite dramatically different than the cynical manufactory of obstruction and scorched earth that it’s morphed into on the watch of the real-world McConnell.
Excerpt: "Nihilist in Chief" by
In the 1960s, McConnell was a liberal Republican, a perfectly normal thing to be at that time. He was even pro-choice (which, again, would have been the natural position of any moderate, non-Catholic Republican at the time). By 1980, Reagan was McConnell’s fourth choice for the Republican nomination for president. But after Reagan’s victory, it became clear which side had won the internecine war over what the GOP was going to be from now on. So McConnell simply became a Reagan Republican
Excerpt: "Nihilist in Chief" by
It’s worth asking if we haven’t been thinking about McConnell’s political “evolution” all wrong from the beginning. Was he a liberal Republican—who still talks about witnessing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington as a young Senate intern—who cynically adapted to changing circumstances? Did he, like fellow pro-choice-Republican-turned-abortion-foe George H.W. Bush, sell out to win? Or was he just a Republican, period, who was a “liberal” one only because he then believed that was the most viable road to success in the party? He was strategically a Rockefeller Republican at a time when you could still make a bet that such socially moderate business types would survive the successive righteous onslaughts of the conservative movement. He has nearly all of his Republican colleagues beat: His moderation itself was cynical.
