Could McConnell have saved GOP with less polarization?

A lot is being written and said about how the Republican Party is reaping — in Donald Trump — what it sowed by enabling and exploiting the noxious backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency.

Along those lines, Kentuckians have our very own “what if” to ponder: What if, almost eight years ago, rather than setting out to thwart Obama at every turn, our own Sen. Mitch McConnell had befriended the first black president?

Not rolled over like a lapdog, of course, but what if McConnell, who Senate Republicans had chosen as their leader in 2006, had shouldered the time-honored role of loyal opposition? What if he had counseled his caucus to seek joint successes with Obama instead of plotting to take the president down one issue at a time?

He would have had a familiar precedent: Republican Sen. John Sherman Cooper of Pulaski County famously befriended glamorous young Democrat John F. Kennedy of Boston and Hyannis Port. A well-known photo shows Cooper and his wife, Loarraine, in their Georgetown dining room entertaining Jack and Jackie shortly after JFK’s inauguration.

What if, instead of warning of Obama’s plans to “Europeanize” us and making 105 floor speeches against expanded health care, McConnell had worked with the president on the Affordable Care Act, as Republican Everett Dirksen worked with Lyndon Johnson on civil rights or Democrat Tip O’Neill with Ronald Reagan on tax reform?

What if, early on, McConnell had denounced and tried to lead his party away from the opportunists and fanatics who would say anything to delegitimize Obama’s presidency? When asked to debunk the claim believed at the time by 31 percent of Republicans that Obama is a Muslim, what if McConnell had come back with something stronger than “The president says he’s a Christian. I take him at his word.”

Wild-eyed claims, including Trump’s that Obama is not a citizen, set the stage for the bigotry and conspiratorial delusions that the Trump crusade normalized and that will seep poison into our body politic long after votes are counted.

Admittedly, McConnell would have risked his leadership post had he pushed back too hard against the Tea Party wave of 2010. Behind the scenes, McConnell writes in his memoir, “The Long Game,” that he was irritated at Jim DeMint’s PAC for soaking donors then bankrolling unelectable GOP candidates.

But McConnell and other Republicans tried to ride the wave, even its ugly racial undertow, and now it’s washed Trump up on their shore.

No matter what happens in today’s election, the GOP loses. If Trump wins, the party has a standard bearer who openly disdains it and, unless he’s the best actor ever, will be a loose cannon in the White House. If Hillary Clinton wins, it will be only the second time in the last 63 years that the same party has held the presidency through three consecutive terms.

When his party won control of the Senate in 2014, McConnell realized his dream of becoming majority leader. But even if Republicans keep control of the Senate Tuesday, it’s an institution so diminished that shrinking the Supreme Court by abdicating the duty to consider nominees strikes some senators as a good idea. Congress is lucky to earn approval from 20 percent of the public, while Obama’s approval rating is par for this point in a presidency at 52 percent.

In Kentucky, Trump is expected to coast to victory and the GOP could take the state House. But McConnell has been eclipsed, at least temporarily, by Republican Matt Bevin, another loose cannon whom a McConnell aide once speculated should be “medicated” for “delusions of grandeur.”

McConnell and Obama seem to genuinely dislike each other. In his memoir, McConnell describes the pain of enduring an Obama “soliloquy” and calls Obama “arrogant and uncooperative.” (I was relieved when he stopped short of “uppity.”) And Obama successfully made a punch line of the senator: “Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”

McConnell obviously does not bear all, or even most, of the blame for Trump’s ascendancy. But you have to wonder: How might things be different if McConnell had risked trying to lead Republicans down a less polarizing path?

A wise friend recently remarked that every peaceful transfer of power after a U.S. election is a rebuke to the world’s tyrannies and despots. Trump’s claims of a rigged election (not to mention Bevin’s call for a religious war if Clinton wins) play right into the hands of those who wish this country ill.

What if a photo of McConnell and his accomplished spouse, Elaine Chao, sharing a meal with the Obamas might have been a prouder legacy than a broken party and Senate, and a nation left tarnished and torn?

This story was originally published November 4, 2016 at 6:31 PM with the headline "Could McConnell have saved GOP with less polarization?."