Jason Zengerle is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.

Even in good times, his face wears an almost cartoonish expression of alarm—like that of a man who’s just remembered that he left the stove on and is miles from home. Gray, watery eyes bulging out from behind his glasses; thin, bloodless lips pursed into a frown. And yet, for nearly 30 years, both in Kentucky and in Washington, D.C., that dour visage has been the face of a raw, even legendary political power.

Mitch McConnell has never been a beloved politician. Over the course of his career, he has been likened to everything from a warmed-over vanilla milkshake to “a man with the natural charisma of an oyster.” But for the 71-year-old Kentucky senator, the minority leader of the United States Senate, that has long been an asset, not a failing. His glower has usually been enough to dissuade those who consider crossing him. “He doesn’t say anything. He just sits there and stares at you,” says one person who has felt McConnell’s ire. “It’s bone-chilling.” While most politicians desperately want to be liked, McConnell has relished—and cultivated—his reputation as a villain. After all, he achieved his iron-fisted grip on the politics of his home state and his fractious party on Capitol Hill through discipline, cunning and, oftentimes, fear. Which is why, at the moments that have found him happiest—winning elections, blocking bills, denying the sheen of bipartisanship to President Barack Obama—he has radiated not joy but menace. Stepping to the microphones at a Capitol press conference some years ago, he announced with the slightest trace of a smile, “Darth Vader has arrived.”


But these are not good times for McConnell, and, for once, his face seems to capture his mood: Mitch McConnell is worried. He is worried that more people in Kentucky now disapprove than approve of the job he’s doing. He is worried that, in Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike now openly question whether he’s still capable of controlling the GOP caucus he worked so hard to lead. He is worried that his office is being bugged and that his wife is being slandered. Perhaps most of all, he is worried that the established political order he embodies is coming apart all around him—imperiling the Republican Party more each day and robbing him of his last best chance to realize the true goal of his career. “Most politicians dream of being president,” his former chief of staff Billy Piper told me. “McConnell dreams of being majority leader.” But instead of plotting to claim the Senate majority, McConnell finds himself just fighting to stay in office. More than at any other time in his nearly three decades as a senator, he’s worried about the bull’s-eye on his back.

For most of Obama’s presidency, McConnell has been the face of Republican obstructionism—never more so than when, in 2010, he declared, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” But this obsession with ending political careers now belongs to the Democrats, who have made McConnell their top target in 2014. “You cannot overstate the enthusiasm for defeating Mitch McConnell,” says the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s Matt Canter. McConnell himself is well aware of the forces gathering against him. “Every liberal in America, every liberal in America, is out to beat us next year,” McConnell told a group of Kentucky supporters in August. Democrats do not disagree with that assessment; they anticipate spending $50 million, or more, to unseat him and have recruited an appealing young challenger.

VIDEO: McConnell vows to make Obama a "one-term president.”

But there are Republicans who want his scalp too. It is a great irony that even though the obstruction-minded McConnell has vexed the Obama administration more than almost any other Republican has these past five years, he has also been the Democrats’ most productive negotiating partner—cutting last-minute, not-so-grand bargains to raise the debt ceiling in 2011, avert the fiscal cliff early this year and, just last month, reopen the federal government and avoid a default. “Does anyone down there know how to make a deal?” McConnell asked when he called Vice President Joe Biden hours before the fiscal-cliff deadline. For such cooperation, some conservatives have branded him a sellout, and worse. “The senator should be retired,” says Matt Hoskins of the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on anti-McConnell TV ads. And for the first time in his six Senate campaigns, McConnell has drawn a serious primary opponent—a Louisville multi-millionaire named Matt Bevin, who has given Tea Partiers the opportunity to make McConnell their top target in 2014 too.

This two-front assault has boxed McConnell into a corner at the most inopportune moment. The midterm elections of 2014, with their combination of open seats and vulnerable Democratic incumbents, had offered him a chance to finally realize his ambition of seizing the Senate majority leader’s office—which, even if it no longer has quite the stature it did when Lyndon Johnson occupied it, would still afford McConnell the most powerful perch of his long political career. In recent years, he had eagerly recruited Republican candidates and plotted their courses to victory—putting his granular knowledge of turnout patterns and media markets at their disposal. But before he could fully execute these grand plans, members of his own party in Congress began acting in ways that made winning back the Senate less possible for the GOP: derailing immigration reform, obsessing over Obamacare, shutting down the government. Suddenly, McConnell, the man no one dared cross, was essentially powerless to stop the hard-liners because of his own political predicament. Never loved, he was now no longer feared.

His personal quandary is very much sign and symptom of a larger political upheaval, as an increasingly ugly civil war has embroiled the Republican Party, pitting its conservative establishment against its even more conservative Tea Party insurgency. For the moment, the Tea Party is winning. In recent years, it has ousted Republican senators McConnell called friends and peers, veterans such as Indiana’s Richard Lugar and Utah’s Bob Bennett—rock-ribbed conservatives both, but neither afraid of sitting and talking with the Democrats. Lugar’s primary defeat at the Tea Party’s hands last year even appeared to bring the famously disciplined McConnell to the brink of tears on the Senate floor: “You’re a treasure to the Senate and a model of the public servant,” an emotional McConnell said. “We’re sorry to see you go, and I’m sorry to lose your wise counsel.”

Now the insurgents, in taking on McConnell, are challenging the very idea of leadership itself. And they have shown how weak those leaders are. Once known for their ability to instill top-down, lockstep unity, the mandarins of the GOP no longer determine—much less dictate—the direction of their party. The tools they relied on for a generation to keep order in the ranks are either gone (legislated out of existence by Republicans themselves, in the case of congressional earmarks) or have been rendered obsolete: Who needs to toe the line in order to get campaign contributions from Wall Street when a new generation of outside conservative groups, such as the Heritage Action Fund and the Club for Growth, now more than make up the difference for candidates who hew to their agendas?

A “big problem in Washington is there are no followers,” Trent Lott, the retired Republican senator from Mississippi who once had McConnell’s job as party leader, told me. “It used to be you could disagree and debate, but when leadership made the call, you had to follow your leadership. … But not anymore,” he continued. “Institutional power is a lot weaker.” That’s why, on most days this fall, McConnell’s dour, worried face seemed to sum up the plight of the entire Republican establishment.

For more than a quarter-century, Mitch McConnell personified the Kentucky Republican Party. When he was first elected to the Senate in 1984, he was a moderate Republican—one who, as a student leader at the University of Louisville in 1964, had urged his classmates to march with Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights and, later, as a county executive, had backed collective-bargaining rights for public employees in order to win labor support. In a state that was predominately Democratic, being a moderate was the only way to get elected as a Republican. But over the years, as the national GOP moved rightward, McConnell, whose ideology was power, moved with it.

In Washington, he changed his political stripes on everything from campaign finance reform (once a supporter, he became its most outspoken opponent) to foreign policy (growing more hawkish). And he brought the Kentucky GOP along, too—methodically building up the state party as he worked with Republican candidates from the courthouse to the statehouse to get them elected. In the process, he helped transform Kentucky from a blue state to a red one: Although registered Democrats still outnumber registered Republicans, Kentucky’s eight-member congressional delegation contains only one Democrat, and Democrats have not had a federal statewide candidate win there since President Bill Clinton was reelected in 1996. “There are now three or four generations of Kentucky political leaders who count McConnell as their mentor,” says Josh Holmes, McConnell’s former Senate chief of staff, who is now a senior adviser to the minority leader’s embattled campaign.

When Senate Republicans elected McConnell as their leader in 2006, they did so very much because of his reputation as a party-builder with a killer instinct. McConnell, Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said at the time, “is the smartest political thinker we have in our conference.” That judgment seemed to be borne out three years later, when McConnell obdurately refused to meet Obama halfway—and persuaded nearly all of his fellow Republican senators to join him—on everything from the economic stimulus to health care reform, thereby undermining one of the central ambitions of Obama’s presidential campaign: an end to partisan strife. As McConnell later explained, “We knew we couldn’t stop the agenda, but we thought we had a chance of creating a national debate about whether all of this excess was appropriate. And the key to having a debate, frankly and candidly, was to deny the president, if possible, the opportunity to have any of these things be considered bipartisan.”

But then, in Kentucky’s 2010 midterm race, the senator made a rare, but crucial, misstep. McConnell had strong-armed the state’s other senator, the elderly and increasingly erratic Republican Jim Bunning, into retirement. He then tapped a protégé to take Bunning’s place: Kentucky’s secretary of state, Trey Grayson. It was the type of move McConnell had performed on countless previous occasions. (His nickname, after all, is “The Godfather of the Kentucky GOP.”) But this time, he ran up against resistance.

A Bowling Green ophthalmologist named Rand Paul, the son of Republican gadfly presidential candidate Ron Paul, decided to challenge Grayson in the GOP primary. He cast himself less as a Republican than as a member of the Tea Party. At first, McConnell’s people used carrots to try to dissuade Paul from launching his bid, offering him the McConnell operation’s backing for a state senate campaign, according to David Adams, then Paul’s campaign manager. But Paul persisted.

That’s when the McConnell team declared all-out war. On the day Paul filed his nomination paperwork at Kentucky’s Capitol, he was greeted by three men in orange jumpsuits, who told reporters they were former Guantánamo Bay detainees there to “thank” Paul—who opposed indefinite detention of prisoners in the military camp—for setting them free. Meanwhile, a McConnell supporter launched a website, TooKookyforKentucky.com, that purported to catalog all the ways in which the libertarian-leaning Paul was just that—including his alleged desire to legalize LSD and marijuana and to ban Christianity from public events. At one point, a McConnell staffer lobbied Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to endorse Grayson, on the false premise that Paul was in favor of abortion rights. Dobson backed Grayson, but after Paul convinced Dobson that he was in fact anti-abortion, Dobson retracted his endorsement and cut an ad for Paul, complaining that he had been given “ misleading information” by “ senior members of the GOP.”

When primary day came, Paul routed Grayson by 23 points. It was a stinging rebuke to McConnell, who had even cut a TV ad for Grayson. “A lot of people thought the race was a referendum on him,” Grayson told me.

After failing to derail Rand Paul’s candidacy in the 2010 Kentucky Senate primary, McConnell changed course and threw his powerful political operation behind the Tea Party-backed Paul—solidifying an alliance that still baffles many. | Ed Reinke/AP Photo

But McConnell quickly executed a striking about-face. If Kentucky’s political terrain had shifted, he would shift with it. And so he put his political operation at Paul’s disposal. Paul was the first Kentucky Republican in some 25 years who didn’t fear—or owe—McConnell, and McConnell realized the threat that Paul and the ascending Tea Party posed. “[McConnell] was actually lucky that Rand Paul was right in his backyard,” argues one McConnell adviser. “He had a very personal and immediate way to deal with things.”

McConnell dispatched trusted Washington aides to Kentucky to help with Paul’s campaign, instructing them, according to both McConnell and Paul sources, to adopt a deferential posture and to pitch in on unglamorous tasks such as advance work. Meanwhile, the minority leader went about ingratiating himself with Paul—hosting fundraisers for him, riding with him on his campaign bus and generally making himself available. After Paul’s final debate against his Democratic opponent, the first person he called, according to a Paul campaign aide, was McConnell. “Rand was so happy about the fact that McConnell was happy,” the aide recalls.

McConnell continued with the charm offensive when Paul got to Washington. Over the objection of his fellow Republican hawks, he secured the realist-cum-isolationist Paul a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He also embraced some of Paul’s pet issues, such as the legalization of industrial hemp, as well as Paul’s alternative budget legislation, which would have eliminated four Cabinet departments and privatized Medicare—a bill so draconian that only 16 senators besides McConnell and Paul supported it. McConnell had been an eager backer of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism tactics, with nary a qualm about their legal implications. But when Paul mounted a filibuster, on civil liberties grounds, of John Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA, McConnell not only gave Paul prior approval to do so but also at one point joined in the filibuster himself. “I wanted to congratulate him for his tenacity, for his conviction and for being able to rally the support of a great many people,” McConnell said of Paul on the Senate floor. Paul, for his part, never became the thorn in McConnell’s side that many expected.

For some in the McConnell camp, the partnership with the upstart Rand Paul is a humiliating arrangement, no matter how necessary.

“They’ve both moved,” says John David Dyche, a Louisville lawyer who wrote an authorized biography of McConnell, “but McConnell has moved more toward Paul than Paul has moved toward McConnell.” Or, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put it, “He tried to make love to the Tea Party.”

For McConnell, the loving is all about shoring up his vulnerable right flank. “To the extent the Tea Party in Kentucky exists, it only exists in the name of Rand Paul,” the McConnell adviser told me. “He’s the piece of the circuit that, if it’s not there, the electricity doesn’t flow through. If he’s for Mitch, there’s no way for a Tea Party candidate to make this work and beat McConnell. … The light bulb never comes on.”

And yet, for some in the McConnell camp, the partnership with the upstart Paul—and his supporters—is a humiliating arrangement, no matter how necessary. “These are people who tuck their shirts into their underwear,” one prominent Kentucky Republican grouses. “My God, they have Mitch out there coming out for industrial hemp! … It just goes to show you the depths he’s willing to adapt to deal with the party as it is today.” Even for a politician long hailed for his pragmatism—“McConnell’s gift is his brutally candid assessment of reality,” Dyche says—his rapprochement with Paul is remarkable, and in some respects risky. “It’s so transparently cynical that it feeds into the whole ‘he’ll do anything to keep power’ charge,” one McConnell loyalist told me. “And I think, given his lack of personality, that’s what makes him vulnerable. … If people lose respect for him because he looks to be holding a finger up to the wind, he could be in trouble.”

McConnell’s most pragmatic—or, depending on your view, craven—move to date has been his choice of a campaign manager for his 2014 race: Jesse Benton. A libertarian political operative who used to work for the American Meat Institute, Benton became a Kenny O’Donnell-like adviser to the Paul family after he married one of Ron Paul’s granddaughters, working as a key staffer on Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns as well as Rand Paul’s Senate run. According to campaign finance filings, Benton is being paid $15,000 a month by McConnell’s campaign and political action committee, as well as between $5,000 and $10,000 per month by the Kentucky GOP for “grass-roots political consulting.” If he stays in his job through Election Day, Benton will have made more than $500,000 as part of “Team Mitch.” But for McConnell, it’s worth it. “When we hired Jesse,” says a Republican strategist close to McConnell, “it codified the Rand-McConnell alliance.”

The hired-gun nature of McConnell’s current campaign was driven home over the summer when a conservative activist released a recording of a phone conversation he had with Benton. During the call, Benton told the activist that he was “sort of holding my nose for two years” working for McConnell, “because what we’re doing here is going to be a big benefit to Rand in ’16.” Benton subsequently apologized to McConnell for his comments—“I could see the hurt in his eyes,” he later said of their conversation—but the episode remains a sore subject to some in McConnell’s orbit. “It’s a big deal, because it gives people an excuse not to support McConnell and confirms what some detractors suspect,” one McConnell adviser told me bitterly. “Jesse wasn’t with him before this, and Jesse won’t be with him after this,” says another McConnell loyalist. “This is the first time Mitch has had a purely political mercenary running his operation.”

And yet all the effort to cozy up to Rand Paul and his acolytes wasn’t enough to prevent the one thing McConnell had never faced: a viable primary challenge. When Tea Party activists began courting Bevin, the Louisville businessman, to run against McConnell, the McConnell team started courting him as well. “They were very interested in me running for any number of offices that weren’t the U.S. Senate,” Bevin says. At one point, according to Bevin, the National Republican Congressional Committee even promised him support if he ran for the House against the only Democrat in Kentucky’s congressional delegation, John Yarmuth. (Josh Holmes denies that McConnell or his campaign was involved.)

When Bevin rejected the carrots, they dialed up the pressure. “I have gotten calls, texts and emails from elected officials, formerly elected officials, lobbyists, people who’ve been in the industry, people who are in the industry, from all corners—business people, people in the religious community,” Bevin told me. “It is unbelievable how wide a net he cast and how strong the effort was to talk me out of this … people saying all the things that would happen to me politically or professionally or reputationally.”

Sure enough, Bevin has faced an unrelenting stream of attacks since he announced his bid in July. Even before Bevin filed his official papers, McConnell launched a stinging television ad accusing his challenger of not paying taxes on one of his companies. McConnell then followed that up with another ad alleging that Bevin had falsely asserted on his LinkedIn profile that he’d gone to MIT.

The attacks have taken a toll. When I caught up with Bevin on a recent Saturday afternoon, he was waiting to speak to a gathering of a few dozen conservative activists meeting in the back of a Chinese restaurant in Elizabethtown. It was a decidedly fringy group. At least two men had pistols holstered to their belts, and at one point one of the speakers talked at length about the government’s efforts to have him killed. When it was finally Bevin’s turn to address the gathering, he quickly opened the floor to questions.

The first came from a large man whose jeans were held up by suspenders. “I want you to answer McConnell’s charges that you’re a liar, that you did not attend MIT, that you are a tax evader,” the man said. “My mother-in-law is a staunch right-wing conservative Republican from the word go. She does not know whether she can trust you.”

“She probably would have wanted to come out of curiosity to see if I had horns and a tail,” Bevin replied. He went on to give a long, and at times stumbling, answer to McConnell’s attacks: The taxes were owed by the company’s previous owner; he’d attended an executive education course put on by an outfit loosely affiliated with MIT. Even so, the activists voted at the end of the meeting to endorse Bevin.

Although he remains a long shot, the mere fact of Bevin’s candidacy is what’s striking.

There’s a myth of Mitch McConnell, and “my job is to test that myth,” Bevin told me. “He’s like the reliever in the bullpen who’s 6’8” and 300 pounds, and [everybody’s saying,] ‘Don’t make us bring in Biff.’ People look out there and go, ‘Good Lord, I don’t want to face Biff.’ But for all you know, Biff can’t throw underhand.”

***

The myth of the mighty McConnell has been particularly powerful among Democrats. “In January 2009, we were at the highest point in our lifetime,” says a Democratic strategist. “Obama was in the White House, we were on the verge of getting 60 votes in the Senate, we had a 65-vote margin in the House. We thought we had Republicans on the run. … And then McConnell grabbed his caucus and held it together.”

Now Democrats see their chance for revenge—and they have adopted an almost McConnell-like focus. They started by backing the appropriate candidate: Prominent Democrats—both in Washington and Kentucky—worked to make sure that actress Ashley Judd did not seek the party’s nomination, fearing that she had far too many political liabilities (among them the fact that she did not live in Kentucky at the time). Once Judd bowed out of the race, these Democrats turned their attention to persuading Alison Lundergan Grimes to get in.

Now Democrats see their chance for revenge—and they have adopted an almost McConnell-like focus.

Just 34 years old, Grimes was elected to her first political office, Kentucky secretary of state, a mere two years ago. But to Democrats, her lack of experience was one of her main selling points. “Not having a long record made her an extremely appealing candidate—there’s less for McConnell to attack,” says one Democratic strategist who encouraged Grimes to run. McConnell’s previous Democratic opponents have all been either men or over age 50. “The facts that are going to be presented to the voters of Kentucky are quite different from what they have been five times before,” Grimes told me. “First and foremost, it’s a profile quite different than Mitch McConnell has ever run against.”

Of course, Grimes’s best asset, when it comes to courting Democrats, is her opponent. “She’s the vessel for all this hatred of McConnell,” says Kentucky Democratic strategist Jimmy Cauley.

“There is a disease of dysfunction in Washington, D.C.,” says Alison Lundergan Grimes, the 34-year-old Kentucky Democrat vying for the Senate in 2014. “And after 28 years, Senator McConnell is at the center of it.” | Stephen Lance Dennee/AP Photo

That hatred has occasionally clouded some Democrats’ better judgment. Earlier this year, a liberal super PAC tweeted racist messages about McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan and served as secretary of labor during the Bush administration. Then a member of the same group surreptitiously (and possibly illegally) recorded a strategy meeting at McConnell’s Louisville campaign headquarters and turned the tape over to Mother Jones, which published a transcript. Both tactics only served to generate a rare sentiment for McConnell: public sympathy.

But lately, Democrats have been finding a more productive avenue for their dislike of McConnell—namely, giving money to Grimes. In September, she traveled to Los Angeles for a fundraiser hosted by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. (“There is no more important election being held next year in this country,” Katzenberg wrote in the invitation.) A few weeks later, Grimes was in Las Vegas for a fundraiser thrown by Reid, who, in a break with the usual comity that exists between the Senate’s party leaders, is actively working to unseat McConnell—and has gone so far as to predict publicly that McConnell will lose. All told, Grimes raked in $2.5 million in her first three months in the race—some $200,000 more than McConnell raised in the same period.

But Grimes’s performance as a candidate hasn’t always matched her fundraising prowess. In interviews, she has botched several of her answers, including one to a question about Obamacare— saying, oddly, that she supported it as a corrective measure against fatty foods at the state fair. At a recent Democratic Party county dinner in Owensboro, Ky., Grimes’s message was straightforward enough. “There is a disease of dysfunction in Washington, D.C.,” she said, “and after 28 years, Senator McConnell is at the center of it. … We have a senator that proudly wears, as a badge of honor, the title of guardian of gridlock.” But her over-caffeinated delivery—which included yelling at times and goading the audience into a lackluster call and response—undermined the power of her words. “At least she’s not waving her arms as much as she used to,” one prominent Democrat in attendance confided.

Still, McConnell has clearly been thrown off balance by his opponent, upsetting even his vaunted instinct for the jugular. “There is that aura that when you run against McConnell, you don’t come back,” says Steven Law, who managed McConnell’s 1990 campaign, during which the senator painted his opponent, a doctor-turned-mayor, as a drug addict who prescribed himself medication with an expired federal registration number. But the McConnell team’s initial attacks on Grimes—branding her a “ cheerleader” for Obama and “ an empty dress”—have backfired, eliciting cries of sexism. An October poll found Grimes leading McConnell 45 to 43 percent.

“No one likes McConnell. No Republicans even like McConnell,” says one Kentucky GOP strategist. “But McConnell makes you dislike the other person so much, you’re like, ‘Holy crap, there’s no way I can vote for that person!’”

The most likely way McConnell will try to bring Grimes down is by associating her with Obama, and already he has attacked her on Obamacare and the president’s “ war on coal.” Linking a Kentucky Democrat to national Democrats is always a smart play in Kentucky, but linking one to Obama—who lost the state by nearly 23 points to GOP nominee Mitt Romney in 2012—is particularly potent. “We are still a racist state, I hate to admit it,” says the Kentucky GOP strategist. “Anything you can connect to Barack Obama is a winning thing for us.” Or, as a prominent Kentucky Democrat puts it: “The only way they can beat [Grimes] is to paint her skin a different color than it is and make her gender a different gender than it is. They’re going to have to make her Barack Obama. If we’re talking about Mitch McConnell, he doesn’t win.”

***

On the last Tuesday of September, McConnell stood in a Capitol corridor underneath the Ohio Clock and announced that he would be voting to allow to the floor a continuing resolution to fund the federal government. “Cloture will be invoked on the bill,” he said. “I will be supporting that, and I think other members of our conference will.”

As McConnell spoke in the bland language of parliamentary procedure just outside the Senate chamber, Sen. Ted Cruz was on the Senate floor launching into what would eventually be a 21-hour speech articulating the diametrically opposite point of view. A vote for cloture was a vote for Obamacare, argued the Texas Republican, likening those who disagreed with his strategy to those who tried to appease the Nazis before World War II.

Eventually, 18 of Cruz’s 44 fellow Senate Republicans agreed with him—not enough to prevent cloture, but more than enough to embarrass McConnell for his inability to hold his conference together. And on the last day of September, when House Republicans ultimately refused to accept the continuing resolution without a provision defunding Obamacare, the government was shut down—an outcome that no one in the Republican establishment, least of all McConnell, wanted.

It wasn’t the first time McConnell had been rendered impotent this Congress. Indeed, after being deemed “Washington’s most important Republican and second-most consequential elected official” by conservative columnist George Will at the outset of Obama’s presidency, McConnell had been an oddly spectral presence for the first 10 months of the year. On issue after issue, he either has stood on the sidelines (as on immigration reform) or was ignored—as when Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain struck a deal with Reid to confirm a raft of Obama administration appointees whose nominations Republicans had been filibustering. “McConnell was in Reid’s office 10 minutes before Reid and McCain were supposed to go to the floor, offering a different deal that Reid rejected,” recalls one senior Democratic Senate aide. “It was just humiliating for him.”

As mad as they are at Ted Cruz and [Utah Sen.] Mike Lee,” one Republican operative who has discussed the situation with GOP senators told me during the shutdown, “there is a conversation going on that says, ‘You know, maybe it’s time we have a change up top.’”

But dealing with Cruz and the handful of other Tea Party senators has shown McConnell at his most powerless. In the months leading up to the shutdown, as Cruz and outside allies whipped up support to stop Obamacare, McConnell sat on his hands. “You can’t strip people of committee assignments and do LBJ stuff,” a Republican strategist close to McConnell told me. The leader’s supporters are convinced any hardball tactics would backfire. “If McConnell called Ted Cruz” and tried to bring him in line on something, a senior Republican Senate aide says, “Cruz’s chief of staff would find out and start tweeting.”

This powerlessness has taken a toll on McConnell inside the Republican Conference. Although the most white-hot anger among Senate Republicans during the shutdown was directed at Cruz—one Republican senator described a GOP lunch during which Cruz came under attack as “ a lynch mob”—there was a growing undercurrent of dissatisfaction with McConnell as well. “This has happened because there’s a leadership vacuum,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn reportedly told McConnell.

“As mad as they are at Ted Cruz and [Utah Sen.] Mike Lee,” one Republican operative who has discussed the situation with GOP senators told me during the shutdown, “there is a conversation going on that says, ‘You know, maybe it’s time we have a change up top.’” Even worse for McConnell, many of the establishment senators with whom he has been closest, the Bennetts and Lugars, are no longer around to offer their support.

Yet the immediate benefits of staying out of the fight for as long as McConnell did were obvious. By not directly taking on Cruz before the shutdown, he denied Tea Party oxygen to Bevin, who, according to an internal McConnell poll from August, trailed the senator by 47 points. “This is the first time the Tea Party groups have picked on someone their own size,” says the GOP strategist close to McConnell. “Bob Bennett, Dick Lugar … none of those guys are McConnell.”

“I’m the guy who steps forward and tries to get us out of the ditch,” McConnell, here with Sen. John Cornyn, said after the shutdown. | Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux

But McConnell could only maintain his disappearing act—and his patience—for so long. And so on a Wednesday in October, 16 days into the shutdown and one day before the debt ceiling deadline, he and Reid struck a deal that avoided default and reopened the government. For a brief moment, it was the McConnell of old—the consummate deal maker—and his reemergence was celebrated around Washington. “McConnell to the Rescue—Again,” read the headline over Morton Kondracke’s column in Roll Call. No one was more elated than McConnell himself, who, in one of several victory-lap interviews, told National Review, “I’ve demonstrated, once again, that when the Congress is in gridlock and the country is at risk, I’m the guy who steps forward and tries to get us out of the ditch.”

But there was a pyrrhic quality to the Republican leader’s triumph. For one, unlike in past deals McConnell had struck, the Republicans had nothing to show for this one—save for the 24 percent approval rating their initial ill-considered decision to engage in this sort of brinkmanship had earned them. McConnell may have saved the patient, but only after catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage had been done. What’s more, it’s not clear that the establishment has any greater control of the GOP than it did before the crisis.

Indeed, as McConnell stood on the Senate floor announcing the deal, Cruz simultaneously held a press conference just outside the chamber to blast Senate Republicans who belong to “ the Washington establishment” for capitulation. And in the days that followed, while McConnell confidently predicted that there wouldn’t be another government shutdown—

“There’s no education in the second kick of a mule,” he said—the Tea Partiers who had engineered it said little that suggested they had learned any lessons. If anything, the Republican Party’s civil war had only become more bloody, more intense.

All of which leaves McConnell’s own power hanging very much in the balance. In August, speaking to the annual Kentucky political picnic called Fancy Farm, he tried to impress upon his supporters that his campaign was about more than just him. “We’re not just choosing who’s going to represent Kentucky in the Senate. We’re going to decide who’s going to run the Senate,” McConnell said. “Here’s the choice: Is the Senate going to be run by a Nevada yes man for Barack Obama who believes coal makes you sick? Or the guy you’re looking at?”

It may well be that, come next November, Mitch McConnell keeps his Senate seat. But it’s also likely that, in doing so, he—and his party—will have lost something more important.

Jason Zengerle is senior staff writer for Politico Magazine .