THE MCCONNELL ERA HAS BEEN TERRIBLE FOR AMERICAN POLITICS:The Senate majority leader delivers hollow partisan victories and little else.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: POLITICS - Mitch McConnell

WE TEND TO think of political eras in terms of presidents: The 1980s remind us of Ronald Reagan, not Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. The same is true of the 1990s and Bill Clinton, the post-9/11 era and George W. Bush, the years after the financial collapse and Barack Obama. Now, it is assumed, we are in the era of Donald Trump.

But are we? Trump is certainly the most visible elected leader in our national political life. But with his inescapably controversial persona serving as the starkest partisan dividing line in our polarized age, he is, perhaps more than any other modern president, also a figurehead--a president-in-name-only, elected to sit in the Oval Office and tweet into the abyss, which may or may not tweet back.

Meanwhile, the real work of legislating and governing is done by others--in particular, by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell, the chelonian senior senator from Kentucky, is almost certainly the most influential Republican in either chamber of Congress. He is the architect of his party's legislative strategy and the tactician behind its more process-oriented victories. Where McConnell goes, the rest of the GOP tends to follow.

And under Obama and now Trump, McConnell--whose steely temperament and avoidance of the limelight make him the current president's stylistic opposite--has adopted a form of politics that is partisan and procedural, focused above all on tactical and electoral victory rather than broad policy goals or ideological transformation. In many ways, it is his world we're living in rather than Trump's.

To understand McConnell's method, it's important to remember that before he was majority leader, he served for four years as the Senate GOP's whip during the Bush administration. The whip is the party leader's top lieutenant, and his job is both to count votes and to pressure them into existence.

It was in this role that McConnell developed a reputation for being a canny legislative tactician with a deep knowledge of the Senate's often-arcane rules and traditions and the ways they could be used to advance the party's interests.

But the whip's role is to execute an agenda set by someone else rather than to develop a long-term legislative vision of his own. The goal isn't to change the world or make it a better place. It's to deliver the party a win.

McConnell has carried over that focus on discrete partisan victories to his tenure as leader. He counts votes and secures them, and he uses the...