HOPE TRIUMPHS OVER EXPERIENCE... Sen. Mitch McConnell, bipartisan peacemaker. That’s kinda-sorta the thesis of the story in yesterday’s Washington Post by the paper’s congressional reporter, Charles Babington. If that idea strikes you as stretch, well, I agree.

McConnell, as you probably know, is a shoe-in to be the leader of the Republican in the Senate after November 7th, regardless of which party wins the majority. Babington presents the argument of “some congressional scholars” that because McConnell has been in the Senate much longer and knows a ton more about that body’s rules and traditions than the departing Senate Leader Bill Frist, that therefore McConnell and his equally-knowledgeable counterpart Harry Reid are likely to be “dealmakers whose top priority is legislative achievement.”

And what evidence is there that McConnell and Reid will reach across the aisle after the elections? Babington quotes Reid’s spokesman saying that the Senate Democratic leader phoned McConnell and offered to work next year on a “bipartisan basis” and that McConnell “expressed a similar desire and willingness.” Yet in the very next paragraph, in the only direct quote Babington has from McConnell, the Republican whacks Democrats for not supporting Bush’s privatization of Social Security.

Hmmmm. Why again should we expect that McConnell will act in a bipartisan manner? The answer, of course, is that we shouldn’t, because he never has. As The Washington Monthly’s Zack Roth detailed two months ago, a power-focused partisanship and a smirking indifference to legislative achievement is precisely what has defined McConnell’s entire political career. Tom Daschle, Trent Lott, Bob Dole, George Mitchell, and virtually all other previous Senate majority leaders were also consummate partisan players, but ultimately they used the passage of major legislation to keep score. McConnell, after 22 years in the Senate, has no great legislative achievement to call his own, and is widely known only for his vigorous attempts to block legislation—specifically, the McCain-Feingold bill. That Babington and his editors at The Post would put forth the possibility that McConnell will divert from this deep career groove is either an example of hope triumphing over experience, or evidence of that paper’s lingering unwillingness to accept, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that today’s Republicans play by a different set of rules.