Mitch McConnell is locked in a behind-the-scenes debate over how to win back the Senate. Should GOP even have an agenda?

President Barack Obama has made no secret about his plan to run against Republicans in Congress. But Republicans in the Senate are still trying to figure out the best way to run against him.

With no nominee yet to spell out the party’s agenda, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is locked in a behind-the-scenes debate with other Republicans over their strategy for winning back power.


The divide within the party is sharp. McConnell and other influential senators believe the party should avoid putting out a detailed platform and focus squarely on Obama’s record, while a range of junior senators — and some veterans like Sen. John McCain — think the conference should lay out a Contract with America-type agenda. Others, such as Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, want to more aggressively push House Republican bills in the Senate in order to speak with one voice coming out of Congress.

But the strategies all carry great risk. If the GOP rolls out an agenda, it will be picked apart and take the focus off Obama. If the party doesn’t bother, it risks giving the president more opportunities to slap the “do-nothing” label on Congress.

And all of this is coming to a head now because the nominating contest involving Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum is showing no signs of ending, with Gingrich even warning that he’d take the race “all the way to the convention” in late August.

The ongoing debate has prompted Senate Republican leaders to schedule a special meeting next Wednesday to discuss election-year tactics, allowing the 47-member conference to continue talks it was unable to conclude at a daylong retreat at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate last week.

While GOP senators are united over the party’s bedrock economic principles, interviews with rank-and-file Republican senators and GOP leaders highlight the disagreements and tensions over tactics and strategy.

“I don’t think we should sit on the sidelines and not have a positive agenda,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Thursday. “The Contract with America worked.”

Some of the disagreement is generational. McConnell is running a class chock full of freshmen and former House lawmakers who have grown impatient with the Senate’s plodding pace.

“We can’t just be the opposition,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a freshman and possible vice-presidential candidate. “We have to be the alternative.”

But others think it makes little sense getting in front of the eventual Republican nominee.

“The nominee, no matter who it is, is going to be carrying the message,” Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina said Thursday. “If we were to jump-start that with something, I think there’s a chance of them stepping on us.”

Texas Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said the next nine months “should be a referendum on President Obama’s three years in office.”

He sounded skeptical of rallying around a document like the Contract with America, the 1994 proposal spearheaded by Gingrich, then House Republican leader, that helped lead to sweeping GOP wins in congressional elections.

“But I do think we need to tell people what we’re for and how things would be better if we win,” Cornyn added.

Asked about McConnell’s position, the GOP leader’s spokesman, Don Stewart, would say only that “members discussed our jobs agenda at the conference and at the leader’s request. We are continuing our discussion on Wednesday because there wasn’t enough time to finish last week.”

Late last year, McCain, with Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio and Rand Paul of Kentucky, unveiled a bill called the Jobs Through Growth Act, which compiled a hodge-podge of GOP ideas aimed at eliminating regulations, repealing the Obama health care and financial services laws, lowering corporate and individual taxes and producing more domestic energy.

It amounted to the closest thing to a Republican agenda, but in November, it failed in the Senate by a 40-56 vote, with Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) voting “present.”

Since then, it’s faded from public view, and Republicans are trying to figure out their next approach.

“It worked back in 1994,” McCain said Thursday when asked about a new platform.

At a closed-door lunch meeting on Tuesday, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota tried to put a finer point on the GOP’s strategy. He advocated a dual approach that would repeatedly call out Democrats for “distracting” voters from Obama’s record while “pivoting” to how the Republican approach would improve the economy, according to a copy of his presentation obtained by POLITICO.

“We need to call out the Obama-Schumer machine when they change the topic from a record they can’t defend,” said Thune’s presentation, referring to New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. “After we call them out, get back on offense! Pivot back to what matters — jobs and the economy.”

Thune, who just became his conference’s chief message man, said his party should push three main issues: reforming the tax code, stopping “job-killing” regulations and increasing domestic energy production. And he laid out what to attack: the economic stimulus, the health care law, the failed Solyndra project and the cash-for-clunkers auto program — on top of an economy the GOP will argue has become “worse” under the president.

All of those suggestions already coincide with Republican rhetoric, but the details are the sticky part.

“We have to be offering people not only what we’re against but what we’re for,” Thune said in an interview. “But that’s a discussion that we’ll continue to have and have to get everybody on the same page. It’s always challenging, I should say, because we got people that don’t necessarily agree on every subject and every issue.”

According to several senators and aides, McConnell believes it makes sense to keep the spotlight trained on Obama, as he did this week in demanding that the STOCK Act banning congressional insider trading also apply to administration officials.

“I think the leader’s right — we’ve got to take the game to the administration and lay out there why their policies have been such a failure,” Thune added.

But Republicans in the Senate are in the minority, so some believe it makes little sense to lay out an ambitious agenda when Democrats control the schedule.

Some of the divisions over tactics have been seen in the first month of the year. For instance, Republicans have not settled on one strategy for responding to Obama’s decision to circumvent the Senate and install four of his nominees. Some senators such as Lee want a more aggressive approach to block future Obama nominees.

But McConnell and other senior leaders have been far more cautious, believing that a knock-down, drag-out fight in the Senate would play into Obama’s campaign against Congress.

“The difficulty which senators have a hard time accepting is that we don’t have a big megaphone, and we speak with too many voices,” said Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander. “And our agenda will be much better understood when we have a presidential nominee who works with us to persuade people that we’re right.”

But whether the presidential contest will end up helping the Senate GOP remains to be seen.

“We need to really have better contact with the candidates,” Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona lamented Thursday. “So it’s just one of those things that never quite works out the way you’d like it to in terms of communication.”