Mitch McConnell’s Health Update: The Capitol’s Longest Cliffhanger

KEY POINTS

•Mitch McConnell, 84, has been hospitalized for nearly four weeks with little information released about his condition.
•Elaine Chao, his wife and former Transportation Secretary, has been known to campaign as a potent substitute for McConnell's physical constituent contact.
•The couple married in 1993 at the Capitol, a ceremony scheduled strategically around Reagan’s birthday and Senate recess.

Mitch McConnell, the 84-year-old senator touted as Kentucky's unofficial Senate pension fund since 1985, has been mysteriously MIA in a hospital for nearly a month—details exactly as scarce as his knack for social hugs, since he had polio as a kid. Meanwhile, his wife Elaine Chao, the first Asian American woman in a presidential Cabinet and self-described 'tiger wife made of titanium,' still campaigns as the 'hug substitute' because Mitch finds backslaps painful. Married in a Capitol chapel in '93 to honor Ronald Reagan's birthday, their love story began over candlelight thanks to a mediator who admitted 'sparks did not fly.' Alongside juggling historic GOP power couple duties, McConnell’s team is playing 21st-century mole-hole with press requests, and no announcement has emerged whether he’s deployed his famous clay pigeon reflex to hospital food or paperwork.