Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader and the man who came to represent the partisan gridlock that marked much of the President’s first term in office after an election night comment in which he vowed to prioritize making Obama a one-term president, has commented on the failure of his stated mission on the eve of Obama’s re-election.
McConnell’s comments in 2010 after the mid-term elections came to symbolize what many on the left deemed an all-in strategy to precipitate suffering in order to claim victory, one that ultimately failed as Obama handily won across many battleground states last night.
The Kentucky GOP leader was often held up as an example of Republicans being unwilling to work, a tenet of the party seemingly adopted on a larger scale along with the rise of the Tea Party. But McConnell has since commented on the Obama victory last night, admitting through gritted teeth that the American electorate “gave President Obama a second chance to fix the problems that even he admits he failed to solve during his first four years in office, and they preserved Republican control of the House of Representatives.”
An olive branch it wasn’t, though, as McConnell may have indicated a lingering disinterest across the right to work with the President on moving forward.
McConnell said that he hoped Obama would “propose solutions that actually have a chance of passing the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a closely-divided Senate, step up to the plate on the challenges of the moment, and deliver in a way that he did not in his first four years in office,” perhaps signaling that, despite the “shellacking” of last evening, Senate and House Republicans may not be entirely embracing bipartisan leadership just yet.
Do you think the GOP and members like Mitch McConnell need to re-strategize to regain voter confidence?