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COPYRIGHT 2004 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of Newsweek is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com
Byline: Howard Fineman
Seated at his desk in Louisville's Federal Building, his coat and tie carefully in place, Sen. Mitch McConnell is the master of all of the Kentucky he surveys. Starting a Biblical 40 years ago as a student at the University of Louisville, the owlishly remorseless McConnell has assembled--in the wilderness of a once Democratic state--a Republican machine that now runs the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, five of six House seats and the state Senate. Poring over his field maps, McConnell relishes the party's latest conquest: the Jackson Purchase, a cluster of western counties along the Mississippi River that had voted solidly Democratic since the Civil War--and that provided McConnell's beleaguered colleague, Sen. Jim Bunning, with just enough votes to survive in November. Pundits and academics who see a nonpartisan "Purple" America, rather than one divided between Red and Blue, are searching for an excuse, McConnell says. "They're looking for a way to explain away what happened last fall. Look at the map: the fact is, the country is overwhelmingly Red."
That's the McConnell of Kentucky: the take-no-prisoners ruler of the Bluegrass. But there is another McConnell--sort of: the McConnell of Washington, D.C., who, as COO of the Senate (with the misleadingly authoritarian title "whip"), has to care about running the federal government and leading the country. To that end, he's been reading history (biographies of Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington), pondering legislative strategy and secretly sounding out...
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