The Price of Power

How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party

Michael Tackett

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781668005866
• Subtopic: Law Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The first definitive biography of Mitch McConnell, revealing an intimate look at the personal and political life of one of the most powerful senators in American history.

In the long history of American government, few senators have wielded as much power as Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell. That’s no accident; he worked his entire life to cultivate his dominance.

In The Price of Power, award-winning journalist Michael Tackett pulls back the curtain on one of the most influential figures to ever set foot in the American Senate, offering you an intimate, personal view of his life and career. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, letters, and more than 100 interviews with associates, colleagues, and McConnell himself, Tackett pieces together the story of McConnell’s early life, his formative battle with polio as a young child, and details his forty-plus-year career as one of the Senate’s most impactful leaders.

A lifelong Republican, McConnell was known as a pragmatic moderate legislator when he joined the Senate in 1985. Tackett traces his steady rightward drift, as McConnell’s politics evolved with his masterful ability to consolidate and wield power. But such success comes at a cost. The Trump years brought with them the rise of an almost unrecognizable Republican party, suffused with a reactive populism that even McConnell himself would struggle to control.

Featuring expert reporting, unprecedented access, and never-before-published revelations, The Price of Power is an inside portrait of exactly that—what it takes to achieve power, maintain it, deploy it, and, finally, watch it slip out of your hands.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Foreword
• Chapter One: Polio
• Chapter Two: Dean and Mac
• Chapter Three: A Changed Man
• Chapter Four: Jim Crow South
• Chapter Five: Becoming Yankeefied
• Chapter Six: The Exercise of Power
• Chapter Seven: “Antsy as Hell”
• Chapter Eight: The “Lost Decade”
• Chapter Nine: “Role Playing”
• Chapter Ten: “Win or Die Trying”
• Chapter Eleven: Land of Giants
• Chapter Twelve: Research and Destroy
• Chapter Thirteen: Mastery of Process
• Chapter Fourteen: “First-Class Ass-Kicking”
• Chapter Fifteen: “No Substitute for Winning”
• Chapter Sixteen: Dream Deferred, Achieved
• Chapter Seventeen: The Power of No
• Chapter Eighteen: “Anybody… Know How to Make a Deal?”
• Chapter Nineteen: “Scalia’s Seat”
• Chapter Twenty: Power Base
• Chapter Twenty-One: “Not Very Smart, Irascible… Despicable… Beyond Erratic”
• Chapter Twenty-Two: “The McConnell Court”
• Chapter Twenty-Three: January 6
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The Fall
• Chapter Twenty-Five: Power
• Epilogue: “The Last Thing You Do”
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright