Washington – President Barack Obama is condescending. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid veers from friendly in private to nasty before TV cameras. And one of Washington’s leading conservatives backstabs fellow Republicans.
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Those portrayals come from a new book by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It’s unsurprising he’d characterize them that way, but doing so in public is unusual for the famously circumspect six-term Kentucky Republican.
Notably absent from the index and a discussion of the infamous 2013 partial government shutdown: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who once called McConnell a liar and has had a chilly relationship with him.
Obama “talks down to people, whether in a meeting among colleagues in the White House or addressing the nation,” McConnell writes in “The Long Game,” a memoir being published this week. He says Obama is like the student “who exerts a hell of a lot of effort making sure everyone thinks he’s the smartest one in the room.”
Reid, with whom McConnell has had numerous epic clashes, is “thoughtful, friendly and funny” in person but in public is “bombastic and unreasonable, spouting things that are both nasty and often untrue.” McConnell writes that Reid’s remark during a 2007 Iraq debate that the war was lost topped the list of “all the insensitive and regrettable” Reid comments.
Some of McConnell’s sharpest descriptions are of some conservatives, notably former Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who now heads the conservative Heritage Foundation.
As senator, DeMint was “almost submissive” at meetings and never confronted colleagues, but “wouldn’t blink at the opportunity to bad-mouth them” to reporters, McConnell writes.
McConnell says it was “utterly irresponsible for anyone to call themselves a true conservative” and have thought the GOP could use a federal shutdown to force Obama to abandon his prized health care law in 2013. The tactic failed and while McConnell describes those responsible, he names no one — including Cruz, the recently unsuccessful GOP presidential hopeful and a major tactician of that shutdown effort.
Reid spokeswoman Kristen Orthman declined to comment, but forwarded an article from Politico in which Reid called McConnell’s descriptions “fairly classless.”
The White House and Heritage Foundation did not immediately respond to requests for comment.