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ONE-ON-ONE - December 2004
by Ed G. Lane
'The American People Were Not Fooled by the Left This Year'
U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell discusses this year's election results and how they will impact the political landscape
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Mitch McConnell
Mitch McConnell has served as Kentucky’s U.S. Senator since 1984, when he became the first Republican to win a statewide race since 1968. Since that time, he has had a significant impact in the Senate and in 2002 was unanimously elected Majority Whip. McConnell currently serves on the Senate’s Appropriations Subcommittee and the Agriculture and Rules Committee, and is chairman of the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee. A native of Louisville, McConnell graduated from the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky College of Law. He served as deputy assistant attorney general under President Gerald Ford and was later elected as Jefferson County’s judge-executive, a position he held until he was sworn into the U.S. Senate. McConnell is married to U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. |
Ed Lane: How do you analyze the November 2 success of the Republican Party on the national level, and in Kentucky?
Mitch McConnell: Well, there is not much, if you’re on the Republican side of the aisle, not to like about the election except for losing an open U.S. Senate seat in Colorado. November 2nd was a terrific day. Republicans gained four seats overall in the U.S. Senate – went from 51 to 55. Looking at our region – south of the Mason-Dixon line – there are only four Democrat U.S. Senators left. One each in Florida and Louisiana, and two in Arkansas. Of course, we were pleased with President Bush’s re-election and also happy that we were not in some endless re-count like we were four years ago. It was a terrific election.
The same could be said here in Kentucky. We gained seven seats in the House, which now makes the Republicans at least a substantial minority now, only being down 57 to 43. Republicans retained a majority in the state Senate and potentially widened the lead from 22 up to 23, depending upon the contested Senate election in Louisville.
EL: How will the cards fall on the residency issue in the Senate race?*
MM: There’s a very strong case to be made that the lawsuit was brought too late and at this stage in the game, the state Senate, under the Constitution, decides whom to seat. So, we’ll see how it all plays out. Republicans will either stay the same or gain a seat in the state Senate.
EL: How about incumbent Jim Bunning’s close race with State Senator Daniel Mongiardo (30th District) for the U.S. Senate seat?
MM: I was pleased that my colleague, Jim Bunning was re-elected. He had a very competitive, hard-fought race, which demonstrates once again that the Democrats are competitive in this state. In case some Republicans are thinking we own the state, I would remind them all of the competitiveness of this U.S. Senate race. The Democrats are still very much in competition in Kentucky.
EL: In Louisville, Ann Northup ran a really strong race for re-election to Congress. And, she received the Courier-Journal’s endorsement. What would you like to say about her victory?
MM: She finally won that seat convincingly. I think the Courier-Journal seems to have sort of given up on the possibility of defeating her and seems to have joined up this time. Ann received 60 percent of the vote in a district that John Kerry carried. It was the only congressional district in Kentucky that Kerry did carry. A very, very impressive victory. The Democrats will be hard-pressed to even find someone to run against her in the future.
EL: Geoff Davis won decisively in the fourth congressional district. Clooney seemed to be in the lead, but the Davis vote really came in strong on election day.
MM: I think Clooney had an early lead. What really happened in the fourth district – which is the most Republican district in our state – is it simply reverted to its previous behavior. It was always an accident that the Democrats won that seat anyway. The Democrats won in 1998 when Senator Bunning moved to the Senate, because of a divisive bitter primary on the Republican side, which afterwards was not properly healed. This year, the Democrat incumbent was retiring and it was an open seat. Clearly, Geoff Davis was helped by the fact that he had run previously and therefore was not a complete unknown. And by the overwhelmingly Republican nature of that congressional district, I doubt if he will ever be seriously contested again.
EL: How would you rate John McCarthy as Kentucky’s new state GOP chairman?
MM: A great job. John is a very, very talented, smart political operative. There were some that were predicting that we were going to have difficulties because Governor Fletcher had had a hard first year and his numbers at the time of the election were not that good. A lot of people were predicting that the Democrats would get the state Senate back and that we wouldn’t make any gains in the state House. None of those dire predictions came true. John McCarthy deserves a lot of the credit for getting the resources together and targeting the races in the state Senate and House where Republicans had the best chance of winning.
EL: Is there a chance a Republican can be elected Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives?
MM: I really don’t have any way of assessing what’s going on within the Democrat caucus in the state House.
EL: Who are potential Democrat candidates for governor in 2007?
MM: The most obvious candidates are the ones who’ve been elected statewide. People like Auditor Crit Luallen and Attorney General Greg Stumbo. State Senator Daniel Mongiardo clearly, now that he ran an impressive race, has got strong statewide name i.d. Those are the kinds of people from whom you would likely see the next Democrat nominee for governor. Of course, that’s three years down the road.
EL: How aggressive will Congress be in reducing expenditures and the deficit?
MM: First, it’s important to remember why our country has an expanding deficit: It has to do with the war on terror. Both spending for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and extra spending for homeland security, all of which is related to dealing with the aftermath of 9/11. If you take out defense and homeland security spending in the appropriations that we just approved, non-defense, non-homeland security, domestic discretionary spending only went up one percent.
The president has a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years. This tight omnibus bill we just passed is a good indication that Congress is going to stick to the plan. Nobody believes, I think seriously, that America should not have fought the war on terror. It’s no accident that we have not been attacked again here at home since 9/11. The reason for that is we’ve been on the offense against terrorists.
EL: Are you concerned about the value of the dollar and inflationary pressures on the U.S. economy?
MM: The markets are going to be impressed with what Congress has done in holding down spending in non-defense, non-homeland security, domestic discretionary spending. I hope that that will be enough. The Federal Reserve has basically inched up interest rates a bit as a further hedge against renewed inflation.
The U.S. has had almost no inflation for a long time and our free-trade policies have helped keep the cost of consumer goods down. If you’ve been to any of the big stores like Wal-Mart and K-Mart, there are incredible bargains, all of which are a result of our trade policies, which are keeping the cost of living for American consumers very, very low.
EL: What is the probability that Congress – with a new flat or alternative tax – can eliminate the complexity and reporting burden on taxpayers to prepare federal income tax returns?
MM: A completely flat tax is not possible politically. There are too many items in the tax code that are too popular. Let me just cite some of them: home mortgage interest and charitable deductions. I’ve been in the Senate long enough to remember the last time we went through this exercise during the second Reagan term. We did get rates reduced from 70 percent at the beginning of the Reagan years down to 28 percent.
Tax rates inched back up under the first Bush and Clinton administrations. Congress has pushed down the rates again under Bush Two. The tax code is too complex. The transaction costs to all of Americans for filling out their tax returns are astronomical. Congress ought to go through the exercise to simplify the code. But, we will not ever be able to achieve total simplicity, which is what a flat tax is.
EL: Was President Bush relatively confident he would be re-elected and did he have an action plan ready to initiate after November 2nd?
MM: He was certainly always confident. Of course, it’s always important for the candidate to be confident. It was a tough, tough campaign and I guess people have already forgotten that President Bush was behind at various points during the course of the year. But he was always upbeat and optimistic about the campaign and about the second term. The changes that have been announced so far are about par for the course. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if there were more changes announced. In terms of policy, the president wants to concentrate on three rather large areas: social security reform, tax reform – which you and I have already discussed – and legal reform. So, I think those will be the principle domestic agenda items of the second Bush term.
EL: How can America improve its international image?
MM: We can’t make American foreign policy based upon pleasing Paris and Berlin. I also think it’s important to remember that the U.S. is not unpopular in all of Europe. In fact, in what (Defense Secretary) Don Rumsfeld calls new Europe – the part of Europe that was in the Warsaw Pact and under the boot of the communists for those many years – the U.S. is extremely popular and that’s from where most of the coalition troops for Iraq have come. Most of the European governments have been supportive, so I don’t think you should draw the conclusion that just because the French and the Germans have not been supportive, all of Europe isn’t.
Having said that, European cooperation is important on a number of items that remain on the unfinished agenda. For example, multi-lateral pressure on the Iranians not to go nuclear; support for renewed talks between Israel and the PLO once the new Palestinian leadership is solidified. European support on both those fronts will be helpful, and I think more likely to be forthcoming than they were on the Iraq portion of the War on Terror.
EL: Did the decisiveness of the Bush re-election shock the mass media?
MM: One of the most pleasing things that I thought about the day after the election was what a horrible day it must have been for (liberal political activist) George Soros, (filmmaker) Michael Moore and (CBS news anchor) Dan Rather. It brought a smile to my face to think about how they must have been feeling after the election.
EL: You had heart surgery about 20 months ago. How are you feeling?
MM: I was very lucky. I didn’t have a heart attack. We discovered that I had some clogged arteries through the testing procedure. We got it fixed and I’m fine. I have no restrictions and am back to being as busy as I ever was and I have been since the summer of ’03.
EL: How difficult is it for you and your wife – Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao – to schedule time and events together?
MM: It’s not as bad as you would imagine. The years that Elaine was out of government we saw less of each other because she served on a number of corporate boards and was doing speaking events around the country. Then, she was really on the road more then than she is now. We have two schedulers that communicate well and we are typically together in the evenings – either I go to something she needs to do or she goes to something I need to do and we’re together most weekends as well. It does require coordination, but she’s in Washington most of the time and many of the trips she took this year were day-trips – out and back in the same day. We see a lot of each other.
EL: Do you believe voters are getting smarter and less likely to be mislead by the mass media?
MM: It’s certainly renewed my faith in the American people that they were not taken in by what was almost a primal scream on the left and an explosion of activity in Hollywood. Some of the media – the efforts by CBS, for example, to discredit the president through Dan Rather’s program were just stunning. But the American people seemed to see through all of that and came, from my point of view, to the right conclusion. There is more competition in the media than there used to be and that’s helpful. You’ve got at least one news channel that I think is fair and objective, that’s FOX. You’ve got talk radio, which is dominated by conservatives and the reason they are successful is because they have an audience. If they didn’t have an audience they wouldn’t be successful. Radio is a commercial enterprise. To get back to your initial question, the American people were not fooled by the left this year and that was very gratifying.
EL: Were there any surprises in Kentucky politics this year?
MM: It’s the Jackson Purchase in Western Kentucky. Politically, that area used to be called the “Gibraltar of Democracy.” In other words, Republicans were simply not competitive. This year a Republican, Kenneth Winters from Murray, won an open state Senate seat. He used to be president of Campbellsville College, and defeated two Democrat incumbent state representatives. That was a truly dramatic breakthrough in Kentucky politics for those counties.
EL: Do you see trends in Western Kentucky as an indicator of the future?
MM: That area is coming our way big-time. When I first ran, I lost the first congressional district by 20,000 votes and thought it was a great victory. The second time, I broke even and was ecstatic. It just keeps getting better. Senator Bunning’s race – I haven’t done all the analysis of the counties yet, but I can tell you he carried Bowling Green, Owensboro, Hopkinsville, Murray and Paducah, and a lot of the other counties down there probably saved his re-election.
EL: Senator Bunning just squeaked through there – it was a pretty tight race.
MM: Yeah, but he lost the two big urban areas by very large margins – Jefferson and Fayette Counties. What I’m saying is he was saved sort of out on plowed ground in the far west, which is really a fascinating and interesting change in Kentucky politics.
EL: Could you give us an update on your leadership status in the U.S. Senate?
MM: I was pleased to be re-elected, last week, as majority whip for the next Congress and I’m happy to still be the second-ranking member of my party in the Senate. Things are good. We’re looking forward to pursuing the president’s agenda as aggressively as we can and hope that we’re going to have greater Democrat cooperation than we’ve had in the past. Fifty-five Republican Senators are better than 51, but it’s not 60. And 60 is the magic number in the Senate for an awful lot of issues, because that’s what it takes to shut down a filibuster.
EL: Senate majority leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) has suggested that the Senate rules could be set so that 51 votes could be required to approve the president’s judicial appointments.
MM: There’s been some discussion about that, but no final decision made. That would create a really big confrontation with the Democrats and I think our first effort ought to be concentrated on trying to get greater cooperation because there are a number of Democrats serving in what we now call “red states.” Republicans are hoping – based on the election three weeks ago – that we’re going to have greater cooperation from “red state” Senators who represent the states carried by George Bush.
Ed G. Lane is chief executive of Lane Consultants Inc. and publisher
of The Lane Report.
edlane@lanereport.com
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