Jim Lo Scalzo/European Pressphoto Agency

Having bet their entire policy agenda on the defeat of President Obama, Congressional Republicans seem adrift. Their efforts to cast the president as a failure by stalling the economy didn’t work. Their furious and false denunciations of health-care reform came to nothing. Their promises that tax cuts for the wealthy would spur economic growth were disbelieved.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, perhaps the best-known lawmaker to have elevated Mr. Obama’s defeat above all other civic priorities, now seems to be casting about for a purpose. He clearly intends to stand in the way of Mr. Obama’s plans, but stripped of his first-term motivation, and facing a far more resolute group of Democrats, he appears diminished in stature. On the Senate floor this morning, warning of obstinacy ahead, he gave a good impression of a man shaking his fist at the gathering storm after refusing a warning to evacuate.



“The only way we succeed is if the president steps up and leads,” he said, as if Mr. Obama hasn’t already been unusually explicit and determined in stating exactly what he wants to achieve in talks over the fiscal cliff. But it turns out that Mr. McConnell isn’t interested in actual leadership; he only wants to be led in the direction he was already going. He said he expects the president to lead the Democrats toward the Republicans, instead of fulfilling the promises Mr. Obama made during the campaign.

The president’s often-stated plan to raise $1.6 trillion over a decade through tax hikes on the rich “is a joke,” he said. And the people who are urging him to simply let tax rates rise on schedule at the end of the year, and then lower them for the middle class, are a “very vocal and very determined group of extremists on the left who are rooting for us to go off the fiscal cliff.” (I guess that means the Republicans who originally put an expiration date on the Bush tax cuts, to hide their full cost, were also determined extremists, since they have given Democrats all the leverage in the upcoming fight.)

Except for the usual demands to cut spending, Mr. McConnell’s speech offered absolutely nothing beyond a statement of what Republicans won’t do.

“What we won’t do is raise tax rates, and kiss goodbye more than 700,000 good jobs in the process,” he said, quoting from a discredited study. “What we won’t do is embrace a tax policy that disincentives saving and work. What we won’t do is agree to revenue in exchange for reforms we know won’t materialize.”

But what will you do, Senator? The question was not addressed, unless the answer is simply four more years of sputtering rage.