Uncommon Knowledge with Mitch McConnell

In this intensely interesting episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson — interesting from beginning to end — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell takes a look back at the dark days of 2009 when the Democrats held 60 seats in the Senate. With that majority, the Democrats jammed Obamacare down our throats, but without a single Republican vote:

Once it was clear the president was going to try to turn us into a Western European country as rapidly as he could, about the only strategy you have left when your opposition has a forty-seat majority in the House. . .We knew we couldn’t stop the agenda. But we thought we had a chance of creating a national debate about whether all of this excess was appropriate. And the key to having a debate, frankly and candidly, was to deny the president, if possible, the opportunity to have any of these things be considered bipartisan.

Mission accomplished.

Toward the end of the interview Senator McConnell casts a gimlet eye on the early start of the Obama reelection campaign in August 2011. Since that time, in Senator McConnell’s assessment, Obama has been AWOL. Senator McConnell presents the Readers’ Digest version of the unifying theme of Obama’s reelection campaign: “It’s not my fault.”

Senator McConnell recalls that his first memory in life is his last session of physical therapy for the polio he contracted at the age of two. From his rehabilitation, he says, he drew a life lesson in the virtues of doggedness. Through our arrangement with the Hoover Institution, we are pleased to present this episode of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson in its entirety.

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