While some people have been upset or irritated at the Congressional GOP for keeping their leadership teams largely intact in both chambers (save for the addition of Trent “They All Look The Same To Me” Lott), and the House leaders John Boehner and Roy Blunt have received most of the attention practically no one has said word one about the future Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.  He had been Majority Whip and has simply ascended to the next position with Frist no longer in the Senate.  In all of the commentary, his continuation in the GOP leadership has gone virtually unnoticed.  Being the whip in a GOP majority that accomplished next to nothing for the last three years ought to earn you a demotion.  Whatever Frist’s failures as Majority Leader, McConnell does not seem to have offset them as the #2 man.  Now Frist’s right-hand man will be leader to take the Senate Republicans ever deeper in Bob Dole-like states of catatonia and me-tooism.  “All we wanted was a place at the table,” Dole famously said (I am paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it) of the Clintons’ health-care legislation in 1993 that he ended up opposing.  He opposed it not on the merits of the policy question, but because he and his had not been consulted and invited to take part in the process. 

Granted, McConnell isn’t Dole.  I fear he is temperamentally more like Bob Michel, even if he has a reputation for being more conservative than Michel or Dole ever did.  Indeed, he has a lifetime 90 ACU rating.  Then again, Bob Dole had an 82 lifetime rating, which shows you how absolutely worthless such ratings are.