Afflicted by polio in July 1944 at age 2, Mitch McConnell was for several years an outpatient at the Warm Springs, Georgia, polio recuperation facility an hour’s drive from his home in Five Points, Alabama. One visit occurred nine days before another polio victim, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died there of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Steel entered FDR’s temperament after steel braces became necessary when he began to lose the use of his legs at age 39. Now, Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, in his fine, evenhanded McConnell biography, “The Price of Power,” describes polio’s contribution to the making of McConnell’s “indefatigable” patience (former House speaker Paul Ryan’s words). McConnell has become the second-most consequential conservative — after Ronald Reagan — in national politics in his lifetime.

Forbidden from walking for two years, McConnell made up for lost time. At 42, he was elected to the Senate 40 Novembers ago. Of the 2,004 people who have been senators, none has led their party’s caucus longer than McConnell’s 17 years, a tenure that ends Wednesday, when Senate Republicans will select his replacement.

Democracy, which is institutionalized persuasion, requires patience, which sometimes requires ignoring public opinion that can be — that real leaders can make — malleable. Although democracy is government by talk, McConnell, “saying little, revealing less,” has, Tackett writes, an “inexhaustible capacity to listen.” Said Sam Rayburn, who served as House speaker intermittently for 17 years: “No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.”

Tackett says McConnell’s colleagues “think he has another superpower: he does not care what people think about him. … He is not weakened by temporary needs like getting applause.” Research has shown some common personality traits of polio survivors, particularly self-denial and competitiveness. And in McConnell’s case, knowledge that private challenges, such as polio, can be far more fearsome than public disapproval.

Henry Clay, now Kentucky’s second-most accomplished senator, was, like McConnell, averse to articulating political philosophy. McConnell’s accomplishments are his philosophy distilled. They include, inter alia:

Protecting free speech from attacks from left and right. Using the legislature to make federal courts more judicial and less legislative. And demonstrating that what the Declaration of Independence calls “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” implies that there can be indecent truckling to opinion.

McConnell has implacably opposed campaign spending restrictions because all political spending supports, directly or indirectly, political speech, the proper amount of which should not be determined by the government. McConnell’s vote prevented cluttering the Constitution with an amendment banning the expressive act of burning the flag. For these positions, he was denounced. He did not care.

Philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) defined “tacit knowing” as knowledge that can be transmitted only by example, not words. He cited mankind’s subsequent inability to produce violins of the quality Stradivarius routinely made 200 years ago. McConnell, treating politics as a vocation, has acquired “tacit knowing” of legislative politics by having no goal beyond the Senate. He never had presidential aspirations, the ruin of many senators.

McConnell was a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer in 1969 when he experienced rehearsals for future fights: Two Nixon Supreme Court nominees were rejected. Decades later, McConnell blocked confirmation of Merrick Garland during the 2016 presidential campaign but permitted the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett during the 2020 presidential campaign. McConnell’s two rationales were statements by Democratic Sens. Joe Biden and Charles E. Schumer indicating that Democrats, in similar situations, might behave as McConnell was doing. Tackett considers McConnell’s rationales pretextual. McConnell was, however, correct about Democrats’ future ruthlessness regarding judicial confirmations.

When Republicans had a slender Senate majority during Donald Trump’s first administration, the president demanded that McConnell do what Democrats today promise to do when next they have a Senate majority: transform the Senate by abolishing the legislative filibuster. McConnell ignored Trump, refusing to bend to the man he despises as “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”

Plutarch said politics, unlike an ocean voyage, has no finality: “It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life.” Today, Americans say they hate politics. Actually, what they hate is its opposite: the performative preening that has displaced politics, which is the patient bargaining that has defined McConnell’s life.

In 2022, while running to be Ohio’s senator, JD Vance denounced McConnell, who did not care: Vance’s narrow victory was secured by $32 million from McConnell’s political action committees. McConnell knows that being in the majority can mean associating with unpleasant, insubstantial people. This, too, is the price of power.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.