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| Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, mid-1980s. |
I agree with most of the criticism of Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. I fault him especially for blocking President Obama’s 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, in his role as Senate Majority Leader, an unprecedented act of hyper-partisanship.
So, it’s surprising that I recoil from many of the ghoulish memes and commentaries pertaining to the mystery of his current health status. I won’t go so far as to say they offend me, but I recoil from the dehumanization of it.
Because I knew the man.
Not to make too much of it. I lived in Kentucky from 1978 to 1987. I live in Chicago now, but Louisville continued to be like a second home to me until a few years ago. Kentucky is a small state and over the years I had contact with many of its politicians, most of it casual or business related. That describes my contact with Senator McConnell.
He was judge-executive of Jefferson County when I moved there. It’s a peculiar title, but it just means he was the chief executive of county government. As Louisville is the seat of Jefferson County and Kentucky’s largest city, the judge-executive job was a good platform for pursuit of higher office, although Louisville politicians did not have a good track record running statewide.
In 1980 I changed jobs, going to work for a marketing firm whose major client was Brown-Forman. I got to know many mid-level executives there but my only contact with senior executives came from non-business endeavors.
Having worked in broadcasting since high school, I volunteered at the local public television station, WKPC, then owned by the Board of Education. When the station transitioned to community ownership, I was named to its new board of directors. This put me into contact with some local heavy hitters. John Yarmuth, who later represented Louisville in Congress, was one of them. We were the two youngsters on the board and didn’t get along. I was much friendlier with two older men who just happened to be associated with Brown-Forman: Roger Coleman, recently retired as Brown-Forman’s president, and Robinson “Robby” Brown, then chairman of Brown-Forman’s board.
In conversation, they both talked up Mitch McConnell, especially Robby, who invited me to a fundraiser for McConnell’s first Senate campaign, to be held at Robby’s home. I initially declined. “I won’t give him any money,” I said, not because I opposed him but because I didn’t have any. “That’s okay, come anyway. It’s a party,” was Robby’s reply, so I did.
I went and had a good time at the party. Robby’s house was beautiful. I probably was introduced to McConnell, but I don’t think we talked. I avoided the inevitable ask. McConnell’s campaign was successful and Brown-Forman executives, including Brown family members like Robby, were major supporters.
So associated was Mitch McConnell with Brown-Forman that, in later years, it was joked that he was the senator from Brown-Forman and Kentucky’s other senator, Jim Bunning (1999-2011), was the senator from Jim Beam. (Bunning and Rich Reese, who ran sales at Beam and succeeded Barry Berish as president, both played major league baseball.)
There is irony in how McConnell’s first Senate campaign was won. His Democratic opponent, Dee Huddleston, the incumbent, had missed a lot of votes. McConnell’s ads featured a pack of bloodhounds trying to track Huddleston down. The ads were the work of Roger Ailes, who later started Fox News. Although Kentucky was heavily Democratic in those days, the commonwealth had voted for Reagan in 1980 and would vote for him again in 1984, with Mitch McConnell riding his coattails.
Now it’s Mitch who is missing in action.
Fast forward a few years. I was self-employed by then and had moved to Chicago but still did a lot of business in Louisville. McConnell, well into his senate career, was setting up the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. My client was commissioned to make a promotional video for the Center. I would write the script and perform other duties related to the production.
Our team had several meetings with McConnell at the producer’s offices in Louisville. I don’t recall him having anyone with him. If there was someone, that person didn’t participate.
I was one of the presenters at the meetings. When you present, you carefully watch your audience, especially the primary decision-maker, to gauge how you’re doing. Often you make changes on the fly based on those often-subtle cues.
But not with Mitch McConnell. He gave me nothing. My main takeaway was that I would hate to play cards with him, because he has no tells. Complete poker face. Otherwise, he was easy to work with, low key and respectful. When he gave feedback, he was direct and unambiguous. In that, he was a pleasure to work with. He seemed satisfied with our efforts and the project came together without a hitch.
Other than being hard to read, he was a good client.
Mitch is an unusually small man physically. Many times, small men compensate by becoming aggressive, especially toward unusually large men like me. He is also soft-spoken while I am the opposite. I had learned to compensate by, for example, sitting down immediately after presenting so as not to seem intimidating. Nothing like that materialized with McConnell. If he reacted to our size difference, like everything else he kept it to himself.
That’s the end of my Mitch McConnell story but here’s a side-story from that same McConnell Center project.
Much of our work had to do with the first class of “McConnell Scholars,” graduating high school seniors who received scholarships from the McConnell Center. As part of their award, the dozen or so kids were given a trip to Washington D.C. with McConnell, where they would, among other things, meet then-President George H. W. Bush. The event would be videotaped and edited for inclusion in our production. My job was to view the raw tapes and prepare the “paper edit,” choosing clips the video editor would pull and edit together for the program.
I had to agree to return all tapes without making copies, which I did dutifully, but I often wished I had been a little less ethical. The tapes were remarkable. As it happened, the president’s meeting with the McConnell Scholars occurred on November 4, 1992, one day after the 1992 presidential election, which Bush lost to Bill Clinton. On the tapes, Bush is clearly exhausted, completely spent, a broken man. He said little and was borderline incoherent when he did. It was a tough edit. Luckily, the kids were supposed to be the focus. They were excited to talk to the president and had a lot of energy. There was just enough of Bush in the final edit for the viewer to remember he was there.
The McConnell Center still exists at UofL, but I had no further involvement with it or with the senator. I’ve had contact with other politicians over the years. Ohio former-Senator Sherrod Brown and I were friends in high school. Sherrod, like most politicians, inevitably calls attention to himself. He works the room. McConnell doesn’t. His way of exercising power is different; deliberate, strategic, and unemotional. It has served him well. I have no more idea than anyone else does about his current status, but I wouldn’t bet against him.
