WASHINGTON - Nearly 200 cartoons hang on Sen. Mitch McConnell's office wall, lampooning him for backing big-money politics or vexing his foes. And that's him getting slammed through a basketball hoop by an airborne President Barack Obama.
At halftime of Obama's first term, the GOP leader is the one soaring. Last month's elections that gave Republicans control of the House, more seats in the Senate and blew the Democrats into glum disarray gave McConnell almost as much power over the government's direction as the president himself.
The looming expiration of tax cuts provided an early opportunity to exploit that clout. The White House came to McConnell, 68, for a deal. Quietly, the Kentucky senator and Vice President Joe Biden, colleagues in the Senate for decades, hashed out an agreement balanced with big victories and tough concessions.
But no player benefited more than McConnell.
Whatever its fate, the agreement moved the Senate minority leader beyond the agenda-blocking role that defined him the past two years. There's now a fragile nexus between the Obama White House and congressional Republicans where there had been scant communication, a precedent for making policy together rather than standoffs.
The "Obama-McConnell" deal, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) derided it, put McConnell at the table with the president he has vowed to turn from office. If the relationship holds, the White House will be dealing with the GOP's most agile negotiator.
In the agreement with Biden, McConnell won Republicans bragging rights over its extension for tax cuts for all, even the rich, along with a generous estate tax break for the wealthy - provisions that have sparked revolt among Democrats.
But in doing so, he also signed off on the package's deficit-swelling cost, estimated at $850 billion over two years. That's more than the Wall Street package savaged by many Republicans in the fall elections, and more than Obama's economic stimulus in 2009. And that has given members of McConnell's caucus - and probably McConnell himself - a degree of indigestion."I think we're all shocked at the sticker price," said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn). Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who has said he'll vote against the deal as-is, nonetheless gave McConnell credit.
"I think he got the best deal we could get," DeMint said.
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