“Bailout” Bevin (which admittedly sounds better than “I kind of like Obamacare McConnell) may or may not be a better politician, but his presence will mean that someone else gets the shot at Majority Leader. I don’t know who that is. He or she may be worse, but the very fact that someone like Bevin was able to knock off someone like McConnell would show clearly that the smart money is on conservatism.
I will add as well the definition of politics as the art of the possible can be read in two ways. Conventionally, it means, effectively, that compromise is inevitable. You can’t get everything you want. You have to play the cards you are dealt.
But I would submit that sometimes it can also mean PROBING the limits of the possible. Sometimes it is the job of the leader to push out into the unknown and find out how far things actually can be pushed.
In poker, playing the cards you are dealt sometimes means winning without even having a single pair, if you are brash enough.
McConnell has more or less been held hostage by terrorists most of his career. The method of the Left is to seek always to hurt, to maim, to weaken, to intimidate. And they are good at it. A minor error on the part of a Republican can hurt far far more than an egregious error on the part of a Democrat. Having a complicit media allows that, having a well honed propaganda apparatus allows that.
McConnell knows what he knows. He has made mistakes in his career and regretted them. He has inadvertently thrown bones to his enemies. He plays safe, and that is how he has survived.
But we are on a path to destruction. Only a fool would deny it. It is time for risk taking.