LEXINGTON, Ky. — Supremely confident in election victory Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell switched gears Monday and cast himself as a national leader rather than a local candidate.
The Republican is on the brink of promotion to the most powerful post in the Senate — majority leader — if, as many predict, his party wins at least six seats from the Democrats in the midterm elections.
The 72 year-old McConnell, taking a swipe at his much younger opponent, Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, made clear during a campaign stop that a victory for him was about far more than securing a sixth term representing his home state.
“Change, my friends, is not about how new you are. It’s about where you want to go, and I want to change America,” McConnell told a crowd of supporters during a swing through Lexington.
Public and private polls show McConnell with a clear and consistent lead over Grimes, 35, who sought to harness voters’ anti-incumbent sentiment. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
As the Republicans’ prospects for winning Senate control increased this past week, interest in McConnell’s race has accelerated. National and international media have swamped Kentucky to interview the man that could wake up Wednesday as one of the three most powerful politicians in America, along with President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
McConnell and his team embrace the idea, and have long yearned for it.
Although McConnell has urged caution in counting victories in other Senate battlegrounds that might or might not materialize, he has not shied away from discussing his own agenda for the entire country in the event that he displaces Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.
McConnell says he’d set a new course. “This crowd has been bad for America, they’ve been particularly bad for Kentucky, and starting tomorrow night we’re going to stop them,” McConnell said.
McConnell said a united Republican Congress would block Obama from spending more, taxing more and over-regulating, especially on energy. He has also expressed confidence that a GOP Senate, with its role in foreign policy, might nudge the administration away from accommodating adversaries.
For instance, on Sunday he said the Iran sanctions bill, now bottled up by Reid at the request of the president, would receive a vote.
Still, he emphasized that Republicans’ goal is to restore Americans’ confidence in the federal government, which has been shaken. McConnell said Republicans would look for areas of compromise with Obama, such as on tax reform and free trade.
“We intend to be a responsible, governing Republican majority if the American people give us the chance to do that,” McConnell said during an interview with ABC News after his appearance in Lexington. “We’re going to do a combination of pointing out the things that we disagree on and things that we possibly agree on.”
