Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has a reputation for running the chamber with an iron fist.
But in a new history of the influence other Kentucky leaders have had in the Senate, McConnell confessed that he’s more salesman than dictator.
In The U.S. Senate and the Commonwealth, he said that many “misunderstand the nature of the leader position and the nature of the Senate.” While they want him to “just jam” measures through, competing factions prevent that from happening.
“That’s why so many of my predecessors have rightly stressed that one of the keys to success as majority leader is being persuasive,” he wrote in the thoughtful and historical University Press of Kentucky book with co-author Roy E. Brownell II.
McConnell said that he has to sell deals and compromises, not force a senator’s hand. Even at the weekly policy lunches, he said, “I am often in ‘sales mode,’ trying to persuade my colleagues of the wisdom of a certain course of action. U.S. senators are talented people with strong views, and by no means a given that I will succeed in convincing my colleagues.”
And when the president is in the same party, the Senate majority leader is typically the White House’s spokesman in the chamber. “He often — but not always — serves as the president’s champion,” said McConnell.
