When I read the Mitch McConnell quote that’s been getting so much attention:

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

my immediate concern was whether it was taken out of context. And if you read the full National Journal interview (subscription required), the nuances are a bit different from those you might take from the quote in isolation.

But not in a good way.

If you read the whole thing, what you get is that McConnell is taking a very different lesson from the events of 1995 than the one most pundits take, and expect Republicans to take. The whole attempt to bully Clinton into slashing Medicare by shutting down the federal government was a political failure for the GOP; but McConnell doesn’t see this as evidence that Republicans were too confrontational.

No, he sees it as evidence that they weren’t confrontational enough; they were too focused on their policy agenda, and neglected the necessary work of destroying Clinton:

We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being reelected, and we were hanging on for our lives.

So this time around they won’t bother much with trying to get actual legislation passed; they’ll focus on the important thing: undermining the man in the White House.