Exit Mitch McConnell, Enter Abdul El-Sayed

McConnell's wife leaves country; Democrats leave old school politics

McConnell sits behind his wife, Elaine Chao

“Elder abuse” — that’s what Charles Booker, the outsider Democratic candidate to replace Senator Mitch McConnell, calls the effort to keep the bedridden 84-year-old in office.

By saying what everyone is thinking but Washington refuses to acknowledge, he embodies the new generation of Democrats rejecting the time-honored tradition of saying nothing in favor of saying something.

From Zohran Mamdani to Melat Kiros, the old guard extinction event is here. These new Democrats are unapologetic about their views. That stands in glaring contrast to their predecessors’ neurotic obsession with focus-grouped sound bites that might poll well but radiate insincerity. You might not agree with the new Democrats, but you don’t need a decoder ring to decipher their positions.

Charles Booker

If the polls are to be trusted, these new Democrats could make up nearly 10 percent of the Congress after the midterms. Wondering what’s driving this upheaval? Look no further than the old guard’s refusal to address the obvious reality that McConnell is circling the drain.

“I don’t want to speculate on anyone’s health,” Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear said last week when asked during a press briefing about McConnell’s hospitalization.

I, on the other hand, have no problem “speculating,” like about the fact that only a tiny fraction (fewer than five percent) of octogenarians survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest like the one McConnell suffered.

I’ll speculate further: even if he’s part of that lucky few, he’ll have brain damage, as the vast majority of survivors do.

Speculation is necessary here because McConnell’s office has refused to say why he’s been in the hospital for the past three weeks, what his current status is, or when he’ll be out. This has led to a lot of confusion, as seen in the following post from an X/Twitter account that provides daily updates on whether McConnell has passed.

All of this “speculation” is common sense to just about any ER nurse or medical expert, who are all over TikTok expressing their bafflement that the media is entertaining the possibility that McConnell will soon be wheeled down the Senate chamber like Hannibal Lecter.

This Weekend at Bernie’s routine explains the success of all the current insurgent candidates: they’re willing to say and do the thing that’s obvious and necessary, rejecting the ways of those with political “experience” (read: expedience) whose slogan might as well be: The buck stops somewhere else. The old guard believes in procedures over results and hide behind things like decorum and civility as an excuse for doing and saying nothing.

Let’s talk about decorum and civility.

McConnell, who has held his Senate seat since 1985, embodies the old ways perfectly. In his final years he became one of the only Republicans willing to break with Trump — voting against his most controversial nominees, including Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and took to the Senate floor to call Trump “practically and morally responsible” for January 6 (while voting against his impeachment). He lamented that his party had grown too populist, too isolationist, too Trump. The decorous man was, by the end, a man without a party.

It’s hard to imagine now, but McConnell was once a moderate — a Rockefeller Republican, pro-choice and pro-labor, who in his first run for local office courted unions so aggressively that he won the AFL-CIO’s endorsement by promising to back collective bargaining for public employees. (Once elected, he reneged.) His biographer Alec MacGillis titled his book, bluntly, The Cynic, tracing McConnell’s shift “from a moderate Republican … to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism” — driven less by any change of conviction than by a bottomless appetite for power.

His first wife, Sherrill Redmon, a Democrat, divorced him in 1980 as he calcified into that operator; she became a feminist scholar at Smith, where she ran the Sophia Smith Collection and worked with Gloria Steinem on an oral history of the women’s movement. In 1993 McConnell married Elaine Chao, who would serve as labor secretary under George W. Bush and transportation secretary under Trump I — and whose family’s China-based shipping fortune, and the millions it delivered to the couple, has trailed him for decades.

As transportation secretary she drew a criminal referral from the department's inspector general for using her staff and office to benefit her family; the Justice Department declined to pursue it. Chao resigned in the days after January 6, one of the “decorous” exits that changed nothing.

McConnell — a lifelong Washington operator who started as a legislative aide to Kentucky Senator Marlow Cook before becoming a deputy assistant attorney general under Ford — hated public speaking and courting voters, preferring a data-driven war room to the stump. This is exactly the politics voters are rejecting. They want to be in the room where it happens, as participants rather than spectators

Which brings us to the insurgent leading the Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat: Abdul El-Sayed. He's a rejection of everything McConnell stands for, distilled into a single slogan: "Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for All." Agree or disagree, you know where he stands.

An MD and epidemiologist, El-Sayed comes not from politics but from medicine — a world whose failures he's clearly passionate about fixing. He ran Detroit's health department after the city's bankruptcy gutted it, then led Wayne County's, serving 1.8 million people. This is not the usual lawyer-to-Washington pipeline of most career politicians like McConnell.

The dinosaur establishment, meanwhile, is spending real money to stop him, which tells you everything.

And McConnell? This weekend it was reported that just three days after his resuscitation and hospitalization, Chao traveled to Beijing to meet the Vice President of China, Han Zheng — for talks Chinese state media described as strengthening U.S.–China ties. Business ties, that is.

McConnell’s wife meeting with China’s VP last month

Contrary to the movies, CPR is brutal: it breaks ribs, cracks the sternum. McConnell, in what are very likely his final days, has been in excruciating pain — alone, at least from his wife.

How’s that for civility?

— Edited by William M. Arkin