A few things are curiously missing from the Mitch McConnell-Elaine Chao Archives at the University of Louisville. At an exhibit designed to celebrate the Senate Majority Leader and his wife, there’s almost no mention of any bills McConnell has authored in his 32 years in the Senate. There’s virtually nothing about the people he’s helped, nothing to highlight courageous speeches made on the Senate floor.
Instead, McConnell's exhibit almost entirely pays homage to the elections he’s won — for high school student government; for Louisville county executive; for his first election to the Kentucky Senate; for his reelection bids to the Senate.
“All the things he chooses to present to the people who come there are about his races,” says Alec MacGillis, a ProPublica reporter and author of a 2014 McConnell biography, The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell, in an interview. "And that's all it is. There's almost nothing in those rooms about what he's actually accomplished in all of the decades he’s been in office."
This is, MacGillis thinks, the key to understanding the inscrutable Kentucky Senator. On Jan. 20, McConnell, 74, will become one of the most powerful men in America and one of the few potential checks on Donald Trump’s power.
So what McConnell really cares about will soon become a question of immense importance. Everyone has a rough idea of Speaker Paul Ryan’s vision for America because he likes to write it down and give speeches about it. For McConnell, the answer is both simpler and more inscrutable — he is obsessed with electoral self-preservation and improvement, with no clear larger purpose.
"Far more than other politicians, it really has been about simply the rise itself. Winning the next cycle. Staying in power as long as you can. Rising in the leadership ranks to the point where you are the leader of the body,” MacGillis says.
In interviews with close to 100 friends and colleagues, MacGillis tracked McConnell from his constant striving in high school for positions in student government, to his head-spinningly quick rejection of his once-moderate political persona, to his refusal to confront or even talk about the most critical policy fights facing his Senate caucus.
McConnell’s story is, on the one hand, a fascinatingly revealing account of how someone with so little charisma and so few ideological convictions can still ascend so high up the rungs of the power. But it is also one whose last and perhaps most important chapter is yet to be written — one which will finally and conclusively reveal if McConnell has been seeking power all of these years for its own exercise or in service of some greater (and still unknown) objective.
"The big question for the Trump era is now that (McConnell) has a big Republican majority to work with in the branches is: will he actually push for substantive ideological gains? Or has all that expediency; all that work; all this thinking about the election all the time — was it all toward this moment where he finally has control and can do what he wants substantively?,” MacGillis says. "Or will it continue to just be about the next cycle?"
Source
http://www.vox.com/2017/1/2/14123496/mitch-mcconnell-motives
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