The Long Game

by Mitch McConnell

  During the week, I was on the phone. We’d gotten the names and phone numbers of people who had previously donated to a Republican candidate. I’d call and ask for a contribution while Terry sat beside me on another phone, asking if we might stop by for a visit. I’d drive for hours to spend forty-five minutes at someone’s home, sharing my vision for the state. On the ride to the next house, to the next conversation and plea for money, I’d handwrite a note to the person I’d just left, reminding them of the financial pledge they’d made. Sometimes people would gather friends at their home and invite me to speak. Standing in those living rooms, a plastic cup of iced tea in my hand, I’d reiterate the words I truly believed: it was time they elected a senator with the guts to deal with the problems facing our country—like the budget deficit, which had been mounting for decades as a result of the inability of some elected officials to stem government spending.

  “Who is standing up for Kentuckians and their interests in this instance?” I’d ask the crowd. “Not the senior senator from Kentucky. In the twelve years he’s been in office, he’s voted in favor of budget deficits or for increasing the national debt on no fewer than twenty different occasions.” I paid to have bumper stickers made, but knowing those things mostly ended up forgotten in a kitchen drawer, I devised a strategy to make sure that didn’t happen.

  “Okay, raise your hand if you want one of these bumper stickers,” I’d say when I was done speaking. Most people were too polite not to raise their hand in my presence. “Now it’s not that I don’t trust you to put it on your car, but keep those hands raised. We want to make this as easy as possible for you.” Terry would then dash around the room with a notebook, jotting down people’s license plate numbers, before heading outside with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels. He’d carefully affix the bumper sticker to the back window, right behind the driver’s seat, so it would be easily visible by every driver following.

  Money was so tight we had to take desperate measures to conserve it. Janet and I devised a gimmick to save money on phone calls. While on the road, I’d place a collect call to the office. When the receptionist answered, the operator would announce a collect call for a code name we’d created to let her know it was me calling. The receptionist would tell the operator that person wasn’t available, which, under the rules of collect calls at the time, allowed me to leave a brief message with a callback number. I’d hang up, retrieve the dime from the pay-phone slot, and wait for Janet’s call.

  We had to do this because a statewide election is, in essence, a television event, and producing it costs money. The only way voters are going to vote for you is if they know who you are, and the only way they’re going to know who you are is if they see you on TV. This is even more crucial if, like me, you were running against an entrenched incumbent whose name people already knew. So I needed airtime, but more important, I needed the right airtime, and the right message.

  This is why one of the smartest moves I made during this campaign was to hire Roger Ailes, later the founder and CEO of Fox News Channel. Roger had been one of the first television consultants in politics, starting with Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. I was happy he agreed to do it, because I sure needed help.

  “I think we should do some positive TV ads,” I suggested at a meeting in the summer of 1984. “Let voters get to know me.”

  “Sure, we could do that,” Ailes said. “I’ll do positive ads that make you look nice so that people like you. You’ll lose, but you can always run again next time.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?” I asked.

  “Do you want to look nice, or do you want to take out your opponent and win this thing?”

  “I want to do what it takes,” I said. “I want to win this thing.”

  “Then leave the ads to me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But look. You need to tell me the truth. Do you think it’s over?”

  Ailes is not one to turn serious that often. But he looked very serious when he answered me. “No,” he said. “But I have to be honest, Mitch. I’ve never seen any candidate come from this far behind this late and win.”

  A few days later, Janet stopped me the moment I got to headquarters. I could tell by the serious look on her face that something big had happened, and given the experience of this campaign, I assumed it was bad.

  “Okay, you were right,” she said.

  “I was? About what?”

  “I finally looked into Huddleston’s financial disclosure statements. He definitely missed votes because he was giving paid speeches.” She told me that most senators paid a lawyer to prepare their statements, but Huddleston had prepared his himself. And lo and behold, there it was: the silver bullet. By comparing his personal financial disclosure with missed votes in the Senate, she found twenty-four instances in which he had been off earning personal money while the Senate was in session, voting.

  The news ignited everyone on our team. I called Roger Ailes to fill him in, and luckily, I caught him on the right day.

  “Someone I work with just ran into Huddleston’s media guy at a party in Philly,” Ailes said. “He was laughing that you’re forty points behind, and he said he was going to kick your ass—and mine—all over Kentucky. I’ve been plotting his murder ever since. Let me think about this.”

  That night, Ailes was watching television, when a commercial for dog food aired, showing a group of puppies scrambling after a bag of kibble. This gave him an idea—one that, a few days later, at a strategy meeting at headquarters, in a cloud of pipe smoke, he outlined for me: a commercial depicting Kentucky hunting dogs on the scent for Huddleston, the lost member of Congress.

  “I’ve looked into it,” Ailes said. “We’re gonna get bloodhounds, because they’re big in Kentucky. And I’ve called Snarfy.”

  “Snarfy?”

  “Yeah, Snarfy. He’s this guy I know. An actor. He looks like he could be from Kentucky. He snarfs. I don’t know, it’s something he does before he starts a scene. Clears his throat or something. So we call him Snarfy.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s going to be led by this pack of dogs, hunting for Huddleston, who has clearly been busy giving paid speeches instead of voting. I love it. What do you think?”

  I had no idea what to think. It was insane. “I think it’s probably better than anything else we got. What do I have to do?”

  “Absolutely nothing. I’ve written the script already. I’ll do it and see what happens. If it fails, you can blame me.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s a good plan.”

  “Look at it this way,” Ailes said. “You got nothing to lose.”

  He was right, and I was willing to try anything. Roger and his assistant Larry McCarthy, who would work on many of my later campaigns, went to work on tasks I’d bet had never before been assigned in a political campaign: finding dogs to film, preparing a man named Snarfy to act like he was a Kentucky farmer. They shot the commercial over a few days, and in September the ad that would eventually become widely known among political science junkies as “Bloodhounds” was released. In it, a man (Snarfy) is holding the straining leashes of a pack of dogs. He leaves Capitol Hill in search of Huddleston, traveling to the same places Huddleston had traveled for paid speeches, like the beaches of Puerto Rico and downtown Los Angeles. Ailes was particularly nervous about the scene he had to film at the US Capitol. His plan was to unleash the pack of dogs, and turn them loose on the steps of the Capitol.

  “We may get arrested for this one,” Ailes told his small crew. “So we gotta do this in one shot.” He placed a pile of hamburger meat at the top of the steps and some in Snarfy’s pant cuff so the dogs would stay close to him until they were unleashed. “I can see the security guards watching,” Ailes said. “Do this quick or we’re on the way to the big house. One . . . two . . . action!”

  By the time the dogs had reached the top of the steps,
Ailes and his crew were surrounded by guards.

  “What are you doing?” one demanded.

  “Why, does this look odd to you?” Ailes looked at his cameraman. “You get the shot?” He nodded. “Okay,” Ailes said to the guards. “We’re done here. Thank you.”

  When the ad aired, I immediately saw the effect. On the trail, people began to approach me, to shake my hand and comment on how funny they’d found the ad. This momentum was just what I needed. Elated, I also knew I had to continue to work tirelessly to keep it going, which meant remaining on the air every day until Election Day.

  But with each small victory there seemed to be another disappointment. Ronald Reagan was up for reelection and I’d hoped to be helped along, at least a little, by riding his coattails. As the Kentucky Senate candidate, I was allowed to attend the presidential debate between Reagan and Walter Mondale, held on October 7 at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts in Louisville. Reagan had a poor showing, appearing old and distracted. Afterward, I joined a sour-looking Nancy Reagan, who was clearly upset with her husband’s performance, at a post-debate rally at the Louisville Hyatt, where I expected Reagan to mention my race and give his endorsement. I had a camera crew ready to film the moment, which we’d planned to immediately turn into our next TV spot. My stomach was in knots as Reagan appeared on the ballroom’s balcony to address the crowd. And sure enough, he did mention me, calling me his “good friend Mitch O’Donnell.”

  I thought this would be one of the most embarrassing political moments I’d ever have to suffer, but then a few weeks later, at an event in northern Kentucky, Vice President George H. W. Bush referred to me as Mayor McConnell, the mayor of Louisville.

  Eleven days before Election Day, I got a break. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, headed at the time by Senator Dick Lugar from Indiana and Executive Director Mitch Daniels (who’d go on to become the very successful two-term governor of Indiana), had started to pay attention to my race. I was the only Republican Senate challenger in the country running against a Democratic incumbent having any positive movement, and the committee decided I might be their guy. They began to send out fund-raising letters on my behalf, and before long, checks from across the country began arriving at headquarters.

  This gave us the resources we needed for one more assault in the media—this time to show voters that I was catching up to Huddleston in the polls. We made a quick decision to release a new “Bloodhounds” ad. For this one, we found an out-of-work Shakespearean actor from New York to play the part of Huddleston. Chased by Snarfy and those same bloodhounds, our actor ran through cornfields, the sidewalks of a small town, and the aisles of a local diner, until he could run no farther and was shown hiding up a tree. The announcer proclaimed: “We got you now, Dee Huddleston. Switch to Mitch.”

  The Friday before the election, I spent the day in the Fifth District and decided to unwind over a late dinner at Café Metro, a little bistro in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville, with a new female friend. As my glass of wine arrived, her eyes lit up.

  “Oh, I forgot to mention this,” she said. “But on the way over I heard a commercial about you on the radio. It was quite nasty.”

  The radio. While we knew Huddleston was going to be attacking me on TV over the weekend, we hadn’t thought to check to see if he was running on the radio. It was a careless mistake at a crucial moment, but I knew I couldn’t allow him to run negative radio ads without a response. I had to fight back. “Thank you,” I said, trying to keep my composure. “Can you excuse me for a minute?”

  I went to the bar and asked to use their phone. Janet was at headquarters. “There’s an attack ad on the radio. Get it as quickly as possible. I’ll call you back in a half hour.” I returned to the table and explained as graciously as I could to my date that I couldn’t stay. After helping her to her car, I was on my way to headquarters. Janet had found the ad, and we immediately called Roger Ailes.

  “You have to hit back,” he said. “Let’s tape a response and get it on the radio right away.”

  I called the studio we’d worked with and asked the manager if he’d be willing to open at 5:00 a.m. He agreed, and by two o’clock in the morning, we’d written our response. I was waiting in the parking lot of the studio in Jeffersontown by the time the manager arrived before dawn.

  Our volunteers were ready too. By 6:00 a.m. I handed a tape of our ad and a blank check to each of ten people waiting in ten cars, who immediately left for every major radio station in the state—in Madisonville, Hopkinsville, Bowling Green. They’d arrive at the station, knock on the door, and ask if Huddleston’s ad was running. If it was, we’d tell them that however many radio spots Dee had bought, we wanted to match him.

  I finally arrived back at my condo in Louisville at 8:00 a.m., exhausted. I’d gotten very little sleep in the last thirty hours, but I was full of anticipation and hope. I pressed through the weekend—a parade on Sunday, a fly-around to seven media markets the day before the election. On November 5, as I walked toward Atherton High School among the other voters, prepared to cast my vote for the next senator from Kentucky, I knew that whatever happened now, I’d given it my all.

  The night of the election, NBC projected me the victor very early. By 9:30 p.m. Huddleston had conceded defeat, but while I joined the others in the ballroom at the old Henry Clay Hotel, where the music blared and the crowd roared in celebration, I was concerned. The win was announced so early. Could I really trust the results? I took the stage around eleven o’clock that night to claim victory. Because I hadn’t expected to win, I hadn’t prepared any remarks. But all day, I’d been thinking back to that November night in 1956, when I watched John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Ballard Morton win their own Senate races. Feeling quite emotional, I dedicated my win to them.

  Leaving the stage, I walked over to Terry.

  “I haven’t seen Janet or Joe,” I said. “Where are they?” Terry said he’d seen them head downstairs, and when I found them sitting together in a quiet room, my heart sank.

  “Do we have a problem?”

  The look on Janet’s face was grim. “Our margin of victory is narrowing,” she said. “We’re down to a couple thousand votes.”

  That night, I went to bed feeling queasy and woke the next morning to learn that Huddleston had called for a re-canvass, in which election officials look at the back of the voting machines and re-add the numbers. We were nervous about them stealing the election, but everyone I consulted with told me that if there was stealing going on, it had already occurred. As those around me continued to celebrate, and I was asked to appear on national morning shows the next morning to talk about my victory, I had a nagging feeling that it wasn’t over; that somehow, this was all going to slip away. In a matter of months, I’d gone from that night of having to tend to my destroyed tree and my dead fish to this morning, appearing on the national morning shows, all while a re-canvass was going on. It was a true out-of-body experience.

  It would be two weeks before the re-canvass was complete and I was officially confirmed the winner. When it was over, I’d won by an eyelash: just 5,100 votes. “That’s four-tenths of one percent,” Roger Ailes said when I called him with the final results. “One vote per precinct.”

  It may have been the slimmest of margins, but I was exhilarated. A win is a win—especially when you consider how far behind I had been at the start of the race. It felt even better when I considered the context of the election. Despite Reagan’s landslide victory, the Republicans lost two seats in the Senate, and out of the entire Senate, only one Democratic incumbent lost: Dee Huddleston.

  I received word that I’d be attending an orientation in Washington, DC, for all incoming senators and I convinced Janet to come with me, as my first chief of staff. She had to buy her daughter a puppy for breaking the promise she’d made, but she agreed. As I packed for life in DC, feeling exhilarated, I received a letter from my fa
ther. He was never comfortable expressing his feelings, and I was extremely touched by what he wrote.

  “There is something I have wanted to say to you, but somehow when we have been together, I haven’t found the right words . . . You have demonstrated a great humanity and a lot of class. I believe very strongly that you will be a truly great leader and senator. You may be assured that you will continue to have my strong support as your father, and as a citizen.”

  Reading that letter, I felt a lump form in my throat. I had so much to thank my parents for. My dad, for bestowing me with the grit and determination I’d needed to stay in the fight, as he had done himself four decades earlier in World War II. My mother, without whose patience and resolve in helping me to overcome polio, I would never be where I was at that moment—having accomplished the thing I’d always wanted.

  I thought of writing them back to say this, but I didn’t. Instead, I vowed to myself that I would do everything I could to make them proud, and to do in the Senate what I’d done in my efforts leading up to this moment: give it everything I had.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Slow and Steady

  In the Senate, most things revolve around seniority, and my seniority—or total lack thereof—was immediately apparent. In 1985, I was one of five freshman senators: Phil Gramm and myself on the Republican side, and Al Gore, Tom Harkin, and Jay Rockefeller on the other. Of one hundred senators, I ranked ninety-ninth, second only to Rockefeller simply because he’d been sworn in a few weeks after me, and I was dead last among Republicans.