Mitch McConnell and his friends are keen to paint the outgoing majority leader as the bookend of the Age of Reagan. Even some of his liberal opponents are happy to repeat the lazy mantra, if only to contrast gooey 1980s nostalgia with the populist conservatism of the new right.
They’d like to remind us how the Kentucky Republican was married on the Gipper’s birthday, but while it can feel nice to reminisce on a young man’s nerdy romance, any serious attempt to understand history’s longest-serving Senate leader needs to focus on the age in which he rose to power: those eight years of Republican rule in the early 2000s. A 42-year-old McConnell may have won his first Senate race at the height of the Reagan years, but by the time he won the mantle of minority leader, those days were gone. More than anything, Mitch McConnell was a Bush Republican.
He’s not alone, in either sense. A good number of the Bush-era alumni like to shroud their doomsaying about the new right in Reagan’s cowl. This makes sense. How hollow would it ring to hear the honest truth, that those Republican elites clashing so violently with the new right represent the Bush wing of the GOP so publicly rejected by their own voters? Few Americans of either party hold much nostalgia about the George W. Bush presidency, and former Rep. Liz Cheney’s headlong charge into obscurity doesn’t quite inspire imitators. Better to draw your authority from a deeper well.
“McConnell
