Quote of the day, on Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s calculated strategy of embracing his critics’ view of him as a villain:

“If the GOP leader is seen as the guy on the front lines beating back the left, there’s almost no downside unless he somehow he finds himself in a competitive general election.”

Politico has written a puff piece. From the headline, “Mitch McConnell embraces his dark side”; to the Darth Vader pose in the photograph atop the story (not the photo I’ve used); to the report that McConnell collects and displays political cartoons skewering him, sometimes asks the cartoonists to sign them, and keeps a tally – 562 and running, with 16 just this year; to referencing “his sense of humor in private”; to the spin that “McConnell’s recasting as a cartoon villain of the left is a dramatic transformation.”

The ‘news’ is that virtually everything McConnell says and does is politically calculated (as if this were surprising).

In January I posted a comment after seeing two stories (in WaPo and the LA Times) about McConnell’s strategic moves to protect the Republican members of the Senate. I noted that the Majority Leader was also protecting himself, because he was “as vulnerable to a primary challenge in 2020 as anyone else in the Republican caucus.”

I added, parenthetically: “(And, after increasing levels of chaos in the Trump White House throughout the first two years, beating a Democrat after two more years of who knows what, may not be a sure thing by November 2020 even in Kentucky.)” In McConnell’s calculations (more realistic than my wistful hope) that scenario isn’t half as likely as a Republican primary challenge. That’s why the man “has embraced the demonization” Politico celebrates.

Welcome to the contemporary Republican Party.