McConnell says GOP Senate will seek areas of agreement with Obama

As he made his way around Kentucky on the eve of Tuesday’s election, Mitch McConnell was asked why he thought this reelection campaign was proving to be so close.

“I don’t think we know how close it’s going to be yet,” he coolly replied.

Not only did the Kentucky senator enjoy a 15-point romp over Alison Lundergan Grimes – one of his largest-ever election wins – but Republican gains across the country gave the presumptive new Senate majority leader a more comfortable majority to lead than most expected he’d have.

The question now is whether the man who once said the GOP’s top priority was to make President Obama a one-term president will follow through on a pledge to seek common ground with the White House at the end of its second term.

“The first thing I need to do is get the Senate back to normal,” McConnell said at a news conference Wednesday. “We’re going to go back to work and actually pass legislation.”

McConnell said there are areas where he expects the president will be willing to work with Republicans, naming trade and tax reform as topics that already came up in a conversation he had with Obama earlier in the day. On Friday, congressional leadership will meet with the president for lunch at the White House.

McConnell twice ruled out the possibility of another government shutdown or a showdown over raising the national debt ceiling, hallmarks of the last four years of a divided Congress.

Beyond that, whether or not Washington sees continued gridlock will depend on the president, McConnell said.

“It will require his complicity,” he said. “Now he’s going to have a Congress that’s going to be more challenging for him, but the choice is really his.”

One immediate flash point for Obama and a new Congress could be immigration. Obama is still considering an executive action to temporarily halt some deportations, a move that could come as soon as next month. McConnell said Wednesday that “would be a big mistake.”

“It’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull,” he said. “I hope he won’t do that because I think it poisons the well.”

He also said Republicans continue to believe that Obamacare “was a huge legislative mistake” but acknowledged limitations they face if they pursue full repeal.

“If I had the ability,” McConnell said, “obviously, I’d get rid of it. Obviously, it’s also true [Obama]’s still there. So we’ll be discussing how to go forward on this issue when we get back.”

McConnell’s campaign this year was an exercise in the kind of tactical jujitsu the Kentucky Republican has engaged in throughout his career, often to the great frustration of his political foes. On the one hand, he vowed to use the power he’d gain as majority leader to halt or reverse Obama’s agenda. He similarly tarred Grimes as an Obama acolyte despite her attempts to brand herself as a “Clinton Democrat.”

But on the other hand, he spoke at length at how he would seek to change the Senate under his leadership, using its arcane rules to find consensus. When his opponent charged in a debate that McConnell was the “guardian of gridlock,” McConnell pointed to several major fiscal agreements that he negotiated with Vice President Joe Biden.

Asked by the Los Angeles Times on Sunday if he was prepared to work with McConnell again, Biden laughed.

“I noticed I got quoted in a debate,” he said. “I’m ready to work with any Republican anytime.”

Biden was among the first to speak with McConnell on Tuesday night after his victory. But the landscape for any negotiations will be far different, with McConnell now in a more powerful role and both parties weighing what would best position them for the 2016 presidential election.

“They’ve got to show they can actually do something,” Biden said in the interview. “If they don’t, that’s a real problem.”

McConnell was asked Wednesday whether the presidential ambitions of some of his own Republican members might get in the way of his stated goal of finding consensus. He said the Senate was composed of “100 class presidents,” each with their own ambitions.

“I’m pretty familiar with our conference, including the new members who are coming in,” McConnell said. “The vast majority of them don’t feel as if they were sent to Washington just to fight all the time. Divided government is not the reason to do nothing.”

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