Price of Power by Michael Tackett is full of insight on campaigns, fundraising, tactical politics, and strategy. Above all else, Mitch McConnell loves the game of politics; he is not driven by policy goals. McConnell is a person with a plan; he does the work to be the person with an answer when it's needed and to know when he needs to be quiet. He is methodical in his power accumulation and deployment and extremely intentional. This book blog is going to be mostly filled with a list of political wisdom and quotes. My favorite thing about this book was the incredible level of candor.
When McConnell got to the Senate, he accrued power by taking jobs others didn't want. Like prior Senate leaders before him, he understood the value of patience and of listening (p IX). He takes time to learn everything about a person, while keeping his information carefully guarded (p324). He was careful with his words and said "no one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut," (p329). A lot of people can learn from that, including myself.
From the start, McConnell was crucially driven by a need to prove himself worthy, in light of his childhood bout with polio. He was motivated to learn how to accrue, use, hold, keep, and build power. His highest priority was always the political play, even when his most basic beliefs about institutions were violated: "To win the policy arguments, you have to win the political arguments. If you don't get the politics right, you don't have enough people elected to get the policy right," (p220). An example was January 6, where his life and his staff's lives were in real danger: "he held a strong belief that Trump had committed an impeachable offense," but politics overrode it. His staff feared for their lives and days later, McConnell took a bet that January 6 was egregious enough that Trump would become politically irrelevant and it did not require his political intervention to legally prevent that, via an impeachment vote (p308).
However, McConnell not only wanted to accrue power, but he loved the game of politics. He was prescient in predicting the rise of rural white voters marching away from Democrats and towards Republicans and actually built that Republican Party infrastructure in Kentucky over 50 years ago (p205). In every interview, he would include things that could be pleasing to the base, and things that could be pleasing to independents. Anybody could find what they were looking for in Mitch McConnell's Republican Party (p214). His electoral tactics were always negative. From the start of his political career, he viewed every election as a referendum on the incumbent and in Obama's first term midterms, his "blocking and blaming" strategy worked (p215). He relied on understanding his constituency and courage to know when to break with the constituency to, a great nugget of wisdom (p66).
"Leaders who won and were effective were those 'who took their time, understanding the issues, learning the system, paying attention to what voters were asking for, and making sure they were superbly prepared," (p85). McConnell figured out the process- that the real impact was in offering amendments to bills, rerouting the budget through the budget reconciliation process rather than the traditional process, and his nearly single handed transformation of the Justice system through appointment confirmations in the Senate.
Overall, this was a tremendously insightful book. I highly recommend it for those in politics as an educational memoir- no idolization here.
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