During a break from plotting the GOP takeover of the Senate, in a campaign based largely on dissatisfaction with the president, Mitch McConnell took a phone call from Barack Obama.

Congress was about to leave for a five-week summer recess, and Obama and Senate Democrats were anxious: The president needed his people in places like Qatar, Kuwait and Algeria — something that could happen only with McConnell’s cooperation.


McConnell agreed. A dozen ambassadors were approved in July, more than half the number confirmed in the previous seven months.

Whenever there’s been outreach by the president and a desire to cooperate by McConnell — mostly over small things, but also in ending last year’s government shutdown — the president and Senate Republican leader have been able to get results.

Now, as Obama and his aides consider life with a Republican-controlled Congress, they look at the incoming majority leader as the only person on Capitol Hill who can help deliver on a second-term legacy achievement.

“A grown-up” is how one White House aide described McConnell.

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It’s not as if Obama and others in the White House have forgotten their history with McConnell, but he looks better than other potential partners. The president’s relationship with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s caucus has hit the rocks. He finds House Speaker John Boehner tedious and unreliable: Too many false starts and acrimonious endings have marred their relationship. House Democrats, for their part, are increasingly full of complaints about the president, but there will be so few of them come January that they’ll hardly matter.

That marks a dramatic shift from the early years of the administration, when McConnell famously vowed to make Obama a one-term president.

“McConnell was dead set on jamming the president, and that defined the relationship until now,” one senior administration official said. Now, the official said, “McConnell and Obama are starting from scratch.”

Nonetheless, it’s still unclear how the White House will be able to cut deals with McConnell without causing a revolt among Hill Democrats. And it’s unclear whether McConnell will be willing to cut deals that might put Boehner in hot water with conservative House Republicans.

The White House also knows it has to move quickly. Administration officials believe there will be only about six months to move on the bipartisan agenda that Obama and his aides have identified around trade, infrastructure funding and perhaps even sentencing reform or early childhood education, before the 2016 presidential race takes center stage.

An early test of whether Obama and McConnell can find common ground will come in the lame-duck session over confirming the president’s roughly 275 stalled nominees. The White House has been quietly working with the offices of McConnell and Reid on a deal to approve many of them — as well as the sweeping omnibus appropriations bill that some fear could be held up as a demonstration of Republican opposition to Obama’s push on immigration. McConnell doesn’t want another government shutdown yet plans to take a tough line on the upcoming immigration order. On Friday, Republican officials began privately discussing ways to disentangle the budget from the immigration fight, possibly by offering separate legislation next year.

There are some small signs the White House is willing to compromise: The administration has withdrawn Sharon Block’s controversial nomination to head the National Labor Relations Board and has intentionally not demanded the Senate confirm Loretta Lynch as attorney general in the lame-duck session.

McConnell praised that move, but he sees few other indications that Obama is ready to change course after the midterm elections, citing his push on immigration and climate change. The immigration effort, in particular, has put McConnell and Boehner in the difficult spot of showing opposition to the president without foreclosing the possibility of future cooperation.

“The problem is the president continues to send signals he has no intention of moving toward the middle,” McConnell said last week during a meeting with the incoming class of Senate GOP freshmen. “I’ve said before: I hope we can do some business on trade and maybe tax reform. First indications have not been very hopeful.”

Before the midterm elections, McConnell and Obama had met one on one only once. Vice President Joe Biden, however, has been a key source of outreach to McConnell, though the two were not close in the Senate.

In a measure of how different a relationship that is, Biden called the new majority leader to congratulate him just as Republicans had clinched the Senate majority. Obama called after midnight and couldn’t reach McConnell until the next day.

Earlier this month, before a lunch meeting with congressional leaders, Obama took a private stroll with McConnell, and the White House released a photo of the two talking in apparent equanimity. Several White House officials portrayed the discussion as short but substantive.

But several people close to McConnell dismissed the brief walk on the White House grounds as nothing more than a photo op.

It was, in the words of one Republican aide, a “Seinfeld meeting.”

“It was a meeting about nothing,” the aide said.

That tough assessment didn’t surprise senior Democrats. McConnell, they believe, needs to show a tough public posture toward the White House, even if he’s open to cutting deals. “McConnell is literally the kind of person you can work with on anything if he wants to be in on the deal,” the senior administration official said.

There’s a sense within the administration that McConnell may be a better personality match for Obama — approachable, but disinclined to conspicuous shows of friendship or emoting in front of the cameras.

“McConnell is a very professional, business-only kind of guy,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a close ally of McConnell’s. “He’s not a back-slapping, gregarious kind of guy. He’s all business. But when he gives a green light to make a deal, they will work 24/7 to make a deal.”

President Barack Obama (center) meets with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) (left), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other members of Congress to discuss foreign policy in the Cabinet Room at the White House on July 31, 2014. | Getty

Obama’s feelings about the two Republican leaders seemed to shine through during his post-election news conference: “Oftentimes, though, we just haven’t been able to actually get what’s discussed in a leadership meeting through caucuses in the House and the Senate to deliver a bill,” the president said, in what many interpreted as a dig at Boehner’s inability to control his fractious House majority. Later, Obama said of McConnell: “He has always been very straightforward with me. To his credit, he has never made a promise that he couldn’t deliver.”

Speaking in Louisville after his victory, McConnell said his relationship with Obama has been “very cordial” and that there hasn’t been a “personality problem” in the past.

“There is only one Democrat who counts: the president,” McConnell said. “The president really has a choice: Because of the strength of the veto pen, he can stay on the course we are on. Or, he could say, ‘Let’s see if there are some areas of agreement.’”

As he deals with the White House, McConnell has said repeatedly he wouldn’t undercut Boehner.

“Boehner and I made a conscious effort not to blindside each other and not to have the distraction of shooting across the Capitol at each other,” McConnell said in a recent interview. “We talk a lot. All I have to do is walk in the hall and follow the cigarette smoke, and I get there pretty quickly.”