http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/battle-for-the-senate-how-the-gop-did-it/2014/11/04/a8df6f7a-62c7-11e4-bb14-4cfea1e742d5_story.htmlBy Philip Rucker and Robert Costa November 5 at 7:52 AM
One night in early September, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called a longtime colleague, Sen. Pat Roberts, from his living room in Louisville, furious about the 78-year-old Republican’s fumbling and lethargic reelection campaign.
Roberts had raised a paltry $62,000 in August. He was airing no ads. His campaign staff, mostly college students, had gone back to school. Most worrisome, McConnell had in his hands a private polling memo predicting Roberts would lose in Kansas — an alarming possibility that could cost the GOP a Senate majority.
McConnell was blunt. A shake-up was needed. Roberts unleashed a flurry of expletives at McConnell. Ultimately, though, the ex-Marine gave in. The next day, he led campaign manager Leroy Towns, 70, a retired college professor and confidant, into a Topeka conference room and fired him. There were tears. “It hurt,” Towns said.
Eleven hundred miles away in Richmond, Va., Chris LaCivita, a hard-charging Republican fixer, was on his back deck picking apart steamed crabs and drinking beer with friends when he got the order to fly to Kansas. The Republican rescue was underway.
While Republicans were moving to address their problems, Democrats were trying to overcome problems of their own — including difficulties with a White House suspicious of their leadership and protective of the president’s reputation, his political network and his biggest donors.
After years of tension between President Obama and his former Senate colleagues, trust between Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue had eroded. A fight between the White House and Senate Democrats over a relatively small sum of money had mushroomed into a major confrontation.
At a March 4 Oval Office meeting, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other Senate leaders pleaded with Obama to transfer millions in party funds and to also help raise money for an outside group. “We were never going to get on the same page,” said David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff. “We were beating our heads against the wall.”
The tension represented something more fundamental than money — it was indicative of a wider resentment among Democrats in the Capitol of how the president was approaching the election and how, they felt, he was dragging them down. All year on the trail, Democratic incumbents would be pounded for administration blunders beyond their control — the disastrous rollout of the health-care law, problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs, undocumented children flooding across the border, Islamic State terrorism and fears about Ebola.
As these issues festered, many Senate Democrats would put the onus squarely on the president — and they were keeping their distance from him.
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