LEXINGTON, KY. • When most people think of Addison Mitch Mcconnell and his impact on politics, they think of the U.S. Capitol and the halls of power along the Potomac River.

Often cast as the consummate D.C. insider, Mcconnell is an equally consummate Kentuckian who regularly tailgates before Louisville football games and hangs out with longtime friends at Cunningham’s Creekside, along a tributary of the Ohio River. He is also an avid baseball fan, even if his major league team is the Washington Nationals.

His rise in power began in 1985, when he was sworn in as the only Republican challenger to defeat an incumbent Senate Democrat in 1984. Its latest chapter involves his perch as the Republican leader of a Senate conference built up from its modern nadir by the rise of the tea party movement.

Mcconnell is a commanding presence in the Senate, and he intends to remain so. He said this week that he isn’t going anywhere soon despite a flurry of wish-casting to the contrary.

Nor does he intend to move out of leadership — not even to the role of appropriations chairman, as West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd did after serving as the minority leader and the majority leader in the Senate.

“You may know that at the end of this leadership term, I will tie Mike Mansfield as the longest-serving Senate leader in American history,” Mcconnell said. “And I have no plans to change roles.” He denied rumors that he would seek an early retirement or, if Republicans win back the Senate in 2022, move from his role as leader to head the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Born in Alabama and raised in Louisville, Ky., Mcconnell’s first run for Senate was considered so unattainable two weeks out from Election Day that even his mother thought he would lose. Then, he ran an ad showing a pack of bloodhounds running around, looking for his opponent, Sen. Walter D. Huddleston. Mcconnell narrowly won that race, and the polio survivor has played catch-me-if-you-can with his Democratic challengers ever since.

Every six years, Washington-based pundits miss from their vantage point on Capitol Hill Mcconnell’s appeal in his home state. They know him as the ruthless tactician who counts noses and twists arms in the Senate. But Kentuckians have a different perspective. Drive through the state, and the evidence abounds that their senior senator is in leadership. Roads and bridges provide the most obvious indication. Less visible are the hemp industry, the guaranteed pensions for retired coal miners, and a declining tobacco industry’s soft landing.

Mcconnell said when he first went to the Senate, Kentucky had 100,000 of what they called “tobacco bases” in 119 of its 120 counties. “It was kind of a relic of the New Deal that assigned what they call the quotas to farms,” he said. “But given the controversy surrounding tobacco and the obvious health concerns, the value of those quotas began to decline.”

Mcconnell explained that the government had created the asset. “It was attached to the land and actually enhanced the value of the land for tax purposes,” he said. “So what I was hoping to do is to figure out a way for the government, which created the asset in the first place, to buy it back and to fund it through a tax on tobacco products. It was kind of a hard sell because a lot of people thought the last thing we needed to be doing was buying out tobacco quotas.”

But in the end, he succeeded. Asked about accomplishments he considers to be the most important, Mcconnell names one of a nonlegislative variety. “The Mcconnell Center at the University of Louisville is a program for the best and brightest young people we can attract,” he said. “I set it up 30 years ago, and it has, at last count, 237 graduates and young people in lots of different fields.”

One of those scholars is Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who in 2019 became the first Republican to win that office since 1948 and the first Black Kentuckian to be elected independently statewide. “For states like mine, frequently, the sharper young people go off to school in the East and find where they came from a little too slow after that,” said Mcconnell.

“So, the idea here was to stimulate youngsters from the state to get a more quality education in the state, in the hopes that they would stay there,” he said. “Out of those 237 graduates, 60% of them live and work in Kentucky. So, I think it’s working.”

On his legacy in Kentucky politics, Mcconnell is quick to point out that he is from a state in flyover country, giving him a perspective that none of the other congressional leaders share.

On the business of Washington, Mcconnell said that the threat of court-packing is more real and more brazen today than when President Franklin Roosevelt attempted it nearly a century ago to intimidate the judges who were on the Supreme Court into ruling favorably on aspects of his New Deal.

“The saying at the time, ‘A switch in time saved nine,’” said Mcconnell of humorist Cal Tinney’s 1937 quip, a reference to the shift in jurisprudence by Justice Owen Roberts. It was seen as a strategic move to protect the court’s independence from a power-hungry president.

Mcconnell said he thinks Democrats are doing the same thing, trying to intimidate the justices to affect their rulings. “You’ve seen Chuck Schumer, for example, go over in front of the Supreme Court and actually seemingly threaten the court if it didn’t rule the way he particularly wanted them to on an issue, which is really quite noteworthy and unusual,” he said. “Having said that, I also believe they’d pack the court if they could. And I think the fact that Joe Biden did not rule this out, just eliminate it — he could have quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer and said, ‘We’re not doing it.’”

Mcconnell expressed some disappointment with Biden’s administration and its political skew. “[T]here’s nothing, nothing moderate about this administration,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind doing some business with them, but I can’t find a single issue upon which there’s any chance of doing a bipartisan deal.”

Mcconnell had no desire to discuss Donald Trump or the very public feud that the former president has tried to carry on with him. On the events of Jan. 6, he said that the two speeches he gave that day, before and after the attack at the Capitol, speak for themselves. One was a rejection of the idea that the Senate should overturn states’ electoral votes based on Trump’s flimsy allegations of a stolen election. The other was a powerful condemnation of the rioters at the Capitol that day. But the senator adds that he finds the lumping together of everyone who voted for Trump with the relative handful of bad actors in January to be ridiculously unfair.