Guess who is the winner in this picture? Shouldn't have to.
If you're Mitch McConnell, you've got to be sitting here thinking you can't possibly have been as lucky as you are today.
Here it is, Democrats have just won a resounding victory at the ballot box. You were thinking you'd be majority leader with a Republican president, and you find yourself losing two seats and still stuck with the same Democratic leadership. You're probably thinking you're about to catch two years of hell having to cast tough votes as you run for re-election. You may even be facing a primary challenge, depending on how things go. Meanwhile you've got a fractured party in the House, no viable party standard-bearer, and worse, a Democratic president with 55 percent approval ratings. You're about to be blamed for ruining the economy. On top of all that, the Democratic majority is about to curb your powers to gum up the works in the Senate. Things couldn't have possibly been worse for Mitch McConnell.
But guess who, at the last moment, comes running to the rescue? Why, it's President Obama and the Democrats! The day is saved!
Because somehow, you've managed to sideline the president of the United States and force him to back down from his mandate, you've managed to stymie the effort to curb your powers to gum up the works, and you've even managed to remove the Democrats' sole tool of leverage in your effort to dismantle government. You've castrated the majority leader. Furthermore, since you managed to delay everything until just after the cliff, you're avoiding the political costs of voting for a tax increase! Better, you're even avoiding the political costs of what you've done ENTIRELY ... and you still have leverage over the debt ceiling!
And all because President Obama and the Democrats couldn't stomach the idea of making Republicans own the fact that they lost the election. So, they found a way to rescue the GOP from itself ... and who would have thought the beneficiary of it all would be the biggest loser in Washington?
Hats off.