McConnell: Wanting to beat Obama shouldn’t be partisan obstacle

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said his desire to unseat President Obama in 2012 isn’t any reason why the two shouldn’t be able to work together.

McConnell, the top Senate Republican, said his publicly-known goal of knocking off the president in 2012 shouldn’t be a hurdle to the pair’s ability to work together over the next two years.

“To assume that just because I would like to elect a Republican president in 2012 — or because he would like a second term beginning in 2012 — that we’re not going to do anything together between now and then is just not correct,” McConnell said in a Wall Street Journal webcast.

The Kentucky Republican drew headlines after saying shortly before Tuesday’s election that defeating Obama in 2012 was his top priority for the next two years, a sentiment on which McConnell doubled down during a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation on Thursday.

Democrats have seized on those remarks to charge McConnell with being a leader who won’t work with the president in good faith, a claim which McConnell rejected.

“I think the notion that nothing will happen in the next two years is not likely to be the result of divided government. And sometimes divided government has produced positive results for the country,” he said.

McConnell and other leaders will huddle with the president at the White House later this month. McConnell said he had spoken with Obama, at the time of taping that interview, twice in 24 hours, which he said was ” an unusual experience, not having had a whole lot of expressions of interest from him in the first two years.”