“There’s much for them to be angst-ridden about,” McConnell said with a chuckle. “If they think it’s bad now, wait till next year.”

Emboldened by Democrats’ decision to scrap an omnibus funding bill and extend the Bush-era tax cuts for two years, McConnell is ready to deploy his larger Republican minority next year, insisting that Democratic leaders will need to bend to his party’s will — particularly on spending issues.

Indeed, McConnell is signaling that the White House should be prepared in the new Congress to support Republican policies — not the other way around.

“If the president is willing to do things that we believe in, I don’t think we’re going to say, ‘No, Mr. President, we’re not going to do this any longer because you’re now with us,’” McConnell told POLITICO in his ornate office across from the old Senate chamber. “Any time the president is willing to do what we think is in the best interest of the American people, we have something to talk about.” (See Obama 2.0: Reinventing a Presidency)

Whether his tough talk amounts to little more than political posturing remains to be seen. But McConnell may have a point — backed by 46 Republicans next year, there will be times when McConnell, not Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), will have a working majority on key issues if he can lure politically vulnerable Democrats to back some Republican proposals. (See: Reid Defends Earmarks in Omnibus)

McConnell will be forced to pick and choose his battles, deciding when it’ll be within his political interest to toe the party line and push House-passed bills and when he’ll have to cut bipartisan deals with the White House that may anger some in his party.

Democrats, peeved at what they see as McConnell’s relentless drive to bring the Senate to a standstill, say they’re not expecting much from the GOP leader in the next two years.

“He’ll do whatever is advantageous to him,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) said.

And McConnell is not only looking toward the 2012 presidential election — declaring that a major goal of his is to make Barack Obama a one-term president — he’s also already talking about his own 2014 reelection race for a sixth term. (See: Obama in the Wilderness)

The 68-year-old McConnell is hiring key staff in top positions and beginning to build a substantial war chest for a race that’s four years away — a sign that he’s not thinking about getting out of leadership anytime soon.

“I’m not planning on running; I am running,” he said definitively. “I’ve never been someone who has started late or who agonized publicly over whether I was going to run. I feel like I’m at the top of my game, at my peak effectiveness, and I certainly am going to run again in 2014.”

To Democrats, McConnell’s comments confirm their suspicions that his motivations are rooted first and foremost in politics and on his desire to beat their party no matter the price. After McConnell’s comments last month that his top political goal was to make Obama a one-term president, frustrated Senate Democrats said in private meetings that their party needed to take a harder line against Republicans to counter the GOP leader.

“If McConnell is going to operate that his major first political goal is to make Obama a one-termer, I don’t know how the Senate operates well,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

McConnell calls the criticisms “laughable,” saying that it’s “not a shocking revelation” that all Republican senators want to see a GOP president take office in 2013, and he said a narrowly divided Senate will actually be ripe for bipartisan compromise.

“We’re going to do business if we can for the next two years, and then we’re going to go out there and butt heads and see if we can’t win in ’12,” he said.

Through the lame-duck session, McConnell and Reid have been largely at odds over major issues. Reid beat McConnell on repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for the military — drawing eight Republicans to support the repeal — but whether McConnell’s opposition to the New START treaty with Russia will be enough to derail the arms agreement will be determined in a matter of days.

One of the more telling McConnell moments of late may have been his behind-the-scenes maneuvering to help kill the $1.2 trillion omnibus measure to fund the government — a bill that was chock full of earmarks that even McConnell himself had requested. Working the phones, McConnell made the case to nine wavering GOP senators that Republicans had to show voters they understood their concerns over big government-spending bills.

“That was sufficiently persuasive to turn the tide,” said Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), one of McConnell’s closest friends, who had supported the omnibus bill.

But Democrats saw pure hypocrisy in McConnell’s stance, given the $113 million in pet projects that appropriators included at his request.

“It was really rich for Mitch McConnell to say that somehow this was a Democratic plot that had been somehow hatched in a backroom, and they were standing up to stop it,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said. “It really just was that a bunch of them thought they could have it both ways, and at the eleventh hour, they thought that they couldn’t.”

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), a senior appropriator who has served with McConnell for 23 years, said she was “very bitter” that Republicans threw “us under the bus when we actually went for the mark that Sen. McConnell himself wants.”

Asked what her impressions of the Republican leaders were, Mikulski said: “I don’t know them anymore. ... I’m really frustrated with this kind of temper tantrum politics that we have going on here.”

In the interview, McConnell acknowledged that the bill included provisions that he — and many Republicans — supported. But he didn’t answer directly why he didn’t ask for his earmarks to be removed from the bill when he had the chance.

“Parochial concerns were trumped by the national interest,” he said. “In other words, it was a bigger issue about whether we had gotten the message from the American people and whether we intended to go in a different direction.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), No. 3 in leadership, said McConnell “deserves credit on the two big issues this lame-duck session: the tax plan and the omnibus bill; he’s been the central figure of the session on both these issues.”

McConnell, a longtime earmarker, touted the amount of federal dollars he brought home during his hard-fought 2008 reelection campaign. But now, faced with criticism from the right over federal spending, McConnell has reversed and agreed to adopt a GOP-only earmark ban in the 112th Congress.

McConnell wouldn’t say how long he anticipates staying on as GOP leader, adding that it depends on the support he feels from the Republican Conference.

Asked if he viewed Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who has made a national name for himself as a conservative activist battling earmarks, as a threat to his leadership, McConnell demurred and would only say, “Why don’t you ask him?” DeMint has repeatedly said he backs McConnell as leader even if the two periodically clash on politics and substance.

“My job is sort of like the choir director: Try to get everybody to sing as close to the same song as I can, and we had a really wonderful experience with that [on the omnibus],” McConnell said.

With a big crop of tea-party-backed freshmen joining the House next year, Republicans are poised to send to the Senate a slew of conservative bills that are likely to collect dust — and McConnell wants his new colleagues to be prepared for the Senate to stall.

“That’s been going on for 200 years: The House passes lots of bills, the Senate doesn’t, so that won’t be any different,” McConnell said.

And while McConnell won praise from most of his GOP colleagues for negotiating the $858 billion tax cut deal with Obama, some conservatives thought he gave away too much and allowed the president to gain some momentum with independents.

But McConnell disagrees, and he also points out that the two-year extension sets up another fight over taxes in a critical year.

“We love having the tax debate in ’12,” he said. “I can’t think of a better time to have a tax debate than in the middle of the ’12 election.”