McConnell had a choice: work with the new president to try to save the American economy or exploit the crisis for partisan gain. He chose the latter. As Alec MacGillis reported in The Cynic,43 his biography of McConnell, the then Senate minority leader told his fellow Republicans, “We begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that.”
