Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell – R-KY (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Listen To You Tell Me Texas Friday 7/21/17

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has never worked a day in his life in the private sector. He has never cashed a non-government paycheck. He began his career as an intern to Sen. John Cooper of Kentucky, was later elected county judge from his home county in Kentucky before winning his Senate seat in 1984, which he has occupied ever since.

In the time that McConnell has been in the Senate, the national debt has gone from $1.6 trillion to $20 trillion, Social Security and Medicare have slipped further into insolvency, the American middle class has shrunk alarmingly and countless American manufacturers have either quit or left the country.

During McConnell’s tenure, an ever-increasing proportion of the population has become dependent on government, American public education has fallen behind that of most of the developed world, the Army, Navy and Air Force have contracted precipitously, the permanent federal bureaucracy has expanded exponentially and American businesses have become among the most over-taxed and over-regulated in the free world.

All of this not to mention that but for massive infusions of subsidy, debt capital and their concomitant interference from the federal government, college and health care have been priced out of the reach of all but the very, very wealthy.

Yet politicians like Mitch McConnell, and those of his ilk (from both sides of the aisle), somehow remain in their jobs. Even though not a dime of actual, bankable long-term national wealth has been created in the United States in something close to 20 years, and even though the congresses of today bear little resemblance to the congresses that helped the nation win World War II, built the interstate highway system and put men on the moon, politicians cut from the same cloth as Mitch McConnell still walk the halls of the Capitol.

At least for now.

In the wake of the Senate’s embarrassing failure to repeal Obamacare, two things seem clear.

First, in the private sector, Mitch McConnell would have been called to the boss’s office Thursday morning and summarily fired for his failure of leadership. In the real world, if you fumble on the order of magnitude that McConnell just did, you lose your job. Only in politics, with its long cycles that permit voter amnesia, does a guy like Mitch McConnell get to stay employed. So McConnell hopes.

Second, Donald Trump’s election wasn’t the fluke that many — including every Democrat and way too many Republicans — would like to believe it was. Voters didn’t so much support Donald Trump as they supported what he stood for. Beyond things like repealing Obamacare, voters saw in Donald Trump the chance to at last bring the bumbling, unaccountable, incompetent and self-serving business-as-usual of Washington D.C. to heel – something that prior presidents have barely even tried.

That desire was intense in 2016 and, given the Senate’s humiliating failure, is even more intense today. Heartland voters are plenty ticked off.

‘Trump the Man’ may or may not last. But ‘Trump the Burning Desire to Fix What’s Wrong’ isn’t going anywhere.