The way Mitch McConnell tells it, he was not one of the cool kids growing up. He wore an "I Like Ike" button in his fifth grade picture. He sat in front of the TV and watched both political conventions in full in 1956. Still, when he was a junior in high school, he decided to run for student council president. This was not an easy task for a nerdy kid without a lot of charisma. But, even then, Mitch McConnell was a pragmatist. He knew what he needed to do.
"To win the election, I needed to run a better campaign," McConnell wrote in his book, The Long Game.
And so he did. He sought out and won the endorsements of the most popular kids in school, like Pete Dudgeon, an all-city football player and Janet Boyd, a well-known cheerleader. How? With an age-old tool: Flattery.
"Mitch had his own agenda," Boyd recalled. "He had a plan."
On this week's episode of Embedded, host Kelly McEvers goes back to Mitch's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to try to understand more about young Mitch McConnell and what those early years tell us about the politician he is today.
Listen to Embedded wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.
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