USA (By Howard Fineman, Newsweek) December 27, 2004 - Seated at his desk in Louisville's Federal Building, his coat and tie carefully in place, Sen. Mitch McConnell is the master of all of the Kentucky he surveys. Starting a Biblical 40 years ago as a student at the University of Louisville, the owlishly remorseless McConnell has assembled—in the wilderness of a once Democratic state—a Republican machine that now runs the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, five of six House seats and the state Senate. Poring over his field maps, McConnell relishes the party's latest conquest: the Jackson Purchase, a cluster of western counties along the Mississippi River that had voted solidly Democratic since the Civil War—and that provided McConnell's beleaguered colleague, Sen. Jim Bunning, with just enough votes to survive in November. Pundits and academics who see a nonpartisan "Purple" America, rather than one divided between Red and Blue, are searching for an excuse, McConnell says. "They're looking for a way to explain away what happened last fall. Look at the map: the fact is, the country is overwhelmingly Red."

That's the McConnell of Kentucky: the take-no-prisoners ruler of the Bluegrass. But there is another McConnell—sort of: the McConnell of Washington, D.C., who, as COO of the Senate (with the misleadingly authoritarian title "whip"), has to care about running the federal government and leading the country. To that end, he's been reading history (biographies of Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington), pondering legislative strategy—and secretly sounding out Senate Democrats. "There are a lot of discussions going on," he says. "We are not suffering from hubris." Even so, the calculus of bipartisanship must change, the senator insisted, now that George W. Bush won re-election and the GOP has strengthened its numbers in the House and Senate. For decades, he said, "bipartisan" meant only a "center-left" coalition of Democrats and a smattering of Republicans. "The key now," McConnell said, "will be whether there are a group of Democrats willing to join with most Republicans in a coalition of the center-right." Translation: Red won, and Blue lost.

The vicious, down-to-the-wire race for the White House last November obscured the key fact about political life as it will be lived in Washington starting in January: Republicans, after decades of assaulting the citadel that Franklin Roosevelt built, have taken control of the place more completely than they ever did in the days of Ike, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan—each of whom was forced to govern in the midst of what essentially was a city controlled by Democrats. That's not the case anymore. The Democrats are leaderless and reeling, seemingly bereft of inspiring ideas. They face a president who is the first since 1936 to win re-election while boosting his party's majorities in the Congress. The "mainstream" media, historically sympathetic to Democrats, are on the defensive, financially and journalistically; the GOP is even taking over the K Street lobbies, an Alamo of unrepentant Democrats.

The question now is whether the GOP can—or even wants to—try to govern from the middle. "I'll believe it when I see it," said one member of the Democratic Senate leadership. "These guys will do a deal—as long as it's entirely on their terms." But White House strategists insist otherwise. "There actually has been a whole lot more reaching out over the last few years than people realize, or give us credit for," says Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser. And, indeed, there are some examples: the original No Child Left Behind education bill, and legislation to create the Department of Homeland Security, which was a Democratic initiative to begin with. Just last week Bush signed the new intelligence bill in front of a smiling bipartisan photo-op choir. Away from cameras, sources say, administration officials have been meeting with Democratic leaders to discuss perhaps the most contentious issue on the 2004 agenda: revamping Social Security to allow young workers to invest in private accounts.

If the GOP tries to lead more moderately, the country might well respond. At least that seems to be the sense in Louisville, the stately, 226-year-old Ohio River city remaking itself as a hub for medical administration, tourism and air-freight logistics. Although Kentucky went for Bush by 20 points statewide, Louisville and surrounding Jefferson County as a unit are more mixed, having voted for John Kerry, Democratic Senate candidate Dan Mongiardo—and Republican U.S. Rep. Anne Northup. At odds for decades, if not centuries, the Democratic city and more Republican county merged, creating a new Metro Louisville government headed by a popular Democrat, Mayor Jerry Abramson—who says he voted for Northup. "There are more crosscurrents of information here," he says, which frees voters from being locked into a party.

If, as expected, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist steps down to run for president after 2006, McConnell is in line to step up to take his place. That would make the 62-year-old senator perhaps the most prominent Kentuckian in politics since Henry Clay—"the Great Compromiser" of the Senate. There is a statue of Clay in the rotunda of the county courthouse, the mayor noted. "We may have to take Clay down and put Mitch up there instead."

But before the marble is chiseled, for the senator or anyone else, consider the power of the vast machinery—most of it based not in the heartland, but on the coasts—dedicated to knocking everyone off each other's pedestals. Rove and Bush have prospered by forcing voters to choose between sharply different visions, and there is no reason to think that they will stop operating in that fashion. Voters and viewers who survived the last election season know that negative advertising predominated—and that it will continue. Personal attacks have been a constant in American politics from the days of Washington, but they can seem especially vivid on cable or when depicted with cinematic power in spots. "It may not actually be worse but TV can make it feel worse," said Abramson.

The Kentucky Senate race was an example, leaving behind a river of bad blood, after the editorial page of The Louisville Courier-Journal, the state's largest newspaper, accused Bunning of mental incompetence and McConnell's Republican allies called Mongiardo "limp wristed" and strongly implied (without a shred of evidence) that he was gay. Both sides' attacks were "completely outrageous," McConnell allowed. But he was startled when asked why he did not denounce the assaults on Mongiardo at the time. "Then we would have had a big war going on among Republicans," the senator said. "We had enough problems without having Republicans shooting at each other right at the end."

Indeed, Republicans almost never shoot at each other, at least in the U.S. House, because they don't have to test their views against the grim reality of a tough re-election campaign. In the states, the parties deploy sophisticated computer programs to draw districts that are almost impervious to upset—and encourage candidates to play to the extremes of their own party to jack up turnout. "We'd be better off as a country if the courts would draw the districts," said Northup. "We'd see life through different eyes." As it is, candidates are increasingly beholden to issue groups—McConnell calls them "the base people"—whose emotions and money drive the process and have taken over much of the vetting role the parties used to play. The fearsome clout of these groups makes would-be politicians wary of entering the trade early, worried that they might compile a voting record vulnerable to attack. Instead, they wait to make money so they can offer an agenda without a track record to judge it by. That, in turn, weakens the idea of lifetime public service and, with it, the ability of the parties to provide protective cover.

And then there is the media division of the Industry of Division: publishing, television, the movies and cable, where there is much hand-wringing about nastiness and much effort to profit from it. The nonfiction best-seller list comprises screeds from the right and the left; last year's movie season was reduced to a fight between Mel Gibson and Michael Moore; cable TV became a war between Fox and non-Fox. A conference of community leaders convened last week by The Courier-Journal concluded—by a vote of 11 to 5—that the media and political establishment had exaggerated the sense of cultural division in the country. But they spent two hours discussing the topic, and the talk was at times heated—and some thought the concern misplaced. "I think we're fortunate to have sharp divisions," said Shawn Dawley, a pilot who has flown missions in Iraq with the Kentucky Air National Guard, noting that the country has been debating profound issues of war and faith since 9/11.

McConnell's back-channel talks with Democrats notwithstanding, the senator was inclined to agree. "It's naive to assume there would be one collection of views widely held by everyone," he said. "I'm amazed at all this hand-wringing over the level of discourse and partisanship. It leads me to believe nobody has read any history. The level of divisiveness now is really quite mild when it's compared with numerous periods in our history." Besides, he and others noted, the divisions aren't nearly as deep as a different color war in the Bluegrass State: the basketball rivalry between the University of Louisville (which wears red) and the University of Kentucky (which wears blue). "Now that is red versus blue," said Abramson. The two teams played in Louisville at Freedom Hall last Saturday. By tradition, the two cheerleading squads link arms to sing "My Old Kentucky Home"—which may be about as close to Purple America as we're likely to get in the year ahead.