Most Democrats probably didn’t hear Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., deliver the argument for a Republican Senate in the final GOP weekly address before the midterm elections. That’s lucky for them. If they had been listening, they might still be fulminating.

The minority leader was leading in his re-election bid against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes and, given the latest polling for races across the country, he could be on the verge of becoming majority leader. So it’s worth listening to McConnell’s view of a Senate controlled by his party. Elect Republicans if you want a less partisan, more functional Senate, he says. Elect Republicans, and they will bring gridlock to “a merciful end.”

The apocryphal tale of the boy who kills his parents and then begs the court for mercy because he’s an orphan is a cliché, but I’m going to use it anyway. There’s simply no other way to characterize a Republican Party that has set records for trying to block President Barack Obama’s nominations, voted against its own proposals after he embraced them and refused to stimulate the economy in ways that both parties used to support.

There’s a lot of devil in McConnell’s (missing) details. He commiserates with “working moms and dads” who find it “almost impossible to balance the demands of work with the needs of a family.” But the United States is the only industrialized nation that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave to take care of a newborn or newly adopted child. Will Republicans get on board with that or a broader 2013 bill that offers paid family leave to caretakers and new parents? So far the signs are not encouraging.

McConnell condemns Democrats for “unworkable ideas that often make the problem worse.” But his examples are questionable. What he calls “a failed ‘stimulus’” reversed a frightening decline. He rails against Obama’s “ideological war on coal,” but many fact checkers, including a TV station in coal-dependent West Virginia, have deemed the charge largely off base.

As for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), McConnell dismisses it as “a health law that cancels policies and too often makes health care even less affordable for you and your family.” Through its premium subsidies, Medicaid expansions and competitive marketplaces, the law has provided affordable or free coverage for millions, but there are no statistics yet on whether the winners outnumber the losers. There are, however, some numbers that McConnell would have to reckon with in any repeal scenario: The number of Americans without insurance declined by 10.3 million as a result of the law, and the uninsured rate dropped from 21 percent to 16.3 percent. His Kentucky, the only state in the South that both expanded Medicaid and set up its own insurance marketplace, saw its uninsured rate drop 8.5 percentage points — the second steepest in the country, after Arkansas.