Mitch McConnell Ends an Era for the Senate, the GOP, and Himself

The forces of change in Republican politics caught up to the longtime Senate leader, but he won’t be exiting the stage just yet.

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Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, announced on Wednesday he would be stepping down as Republican leader at the end of the year.

Mitch McConnell has confessed over the years that as a junior member of the Senate, he longed to be the one whom reporters chased down for information as he jealously watched his more senior colleagues being pursued by the media while he was ignored.

“The truth is, when I got here, I was just happy if anybody remembered my name,” he said on Wednesday in announcing that his time as leader was coming to an end. He noted that President Ronald Reagan had once misidentified him as Mitch O’Donnell.

“Close enough, I thought,” he recalled.

Then, after Mr. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, had accumulated real power in the Senate as both majority and minority leader over a 17-year stretch and deftly applied it to bend the Senate to his will, he clammed up. He often refused to even acknowledge the existence of the press as reporters posed questions and he strolled by, sphinx-like.

One thing Mr. McConnell was always clear about, however, was that he saw the United States as the globe’s essential force, embracing Reagan’s view that the nation’s role was to combat the so-called “evil empire” of what was then the Soviet Union. He reiterated that view on Thursday in his first day as a lame-duck leader.

“America is the world’s pre-eminent superpower — economically and militarily. But our influence and prosperity are facilitated by a network of partnerships,” Mr. McConnell said. “The strength of these alliances rests on the credibility of the commitments we make to our friends.”

Yet a growing number of his fellow Republicans hold a different view of America’s role in the world, and Mr. McConnell took that as his cue to step aside, though he undoubtedly will continue to push military assistance to Ukraine for its fight against what is now Russia.

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