LIKE FRIST, ONLY COMPETENT. Another Sunday, another exceedingly unimpressive appearance by Bill Frist on a chat show. Meanwhile, Zachary Roth and Cliff Schecter have a good piece in The Washington Monthly about the man who will succeed Frist as Republican Senate leader (be it in the majority or the minority) when the latter retires this term -- Mitch McConnell. Looking back over his highly undistinguished tenure as majority leader, I'm tempted to say that Frist was something of a victim of his times -- being caught in the tension between the partisan and parliamentary turn under Bush on the one hand and the still-extraordinarily sticky, inefficient, non-majoritarian structure of the Senate on the other. That is to say, he was handpicked by the White House and then tasked with delivering legislative wins for the GOP that were impossible for anyone to pull off in the Senate. Be that as it may, Frist's basic ineptness at parliamentary tactics and vote counting only compounded the difficulties of an inherently difficult job. Roth and Schecter demonstrate pretty persuasively that McConnell will serve as a much more competent -- and ruthless -- partisan tactician in his role as leader.
The only mitigating factor will be the likelihood that, even if the GOP does maintain control of Congress, the whole disciplined and mobilized legislative apparatus the Republicans maintained during Bush's first term will have ground to a complete halt by 2007, with a lame duck president and various factions positioning themselves behind various would-be presidential candidates.
--Sam Rosenfeld
