THE GOP INGRATES KEVIN MCCARTHY LEFT BEHIND
Kevin McCarthy’s triumph in gaining the speaker’s gavel after 15 ballots was perhaps sweeter than anyone not named McCarthy knows, because it was so very hard to gain, and because it was so long in coming.
McCarthy, R-Calif., won’t be exiling his die-hard opponents as Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena. In fact, he will welcome working with some of them, such as the widely admired debt-hawk Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas. He and the rest of the GOP conference will have to tolerate the six selfish bitter-enders who are marked indelibly. The Beltway isn’t unique in the scale of ingratitude from those who have been helped along the way toward those who helped them. But ingratitude is always repulsive. That such folks have a role in our politics leaves a sour aftertaste.
The road to victory began long before McCarthy’s first bid for the speaker’s gavel came up short in 2015. It began before he joined the House in 2007, and even before McCarthy was elected to the California State Assembly in 2002. Perhaps it began when McCarthy served as a staffer to that mighty force of California politics, Rep. Bill Thomas, the Republican for whom McCarthy worked for 15 years, beginning while still in college.
People who weren’t born when McCarthy won his first election are penning posts or recording podcasts for tiny audiences in which they speculate grandly about the speaker’s difficulties ahead. They don’t get it. McCarthy reached “the top of the greasy pole,” as the brilliant 19th-century British parliamentarian Benjamin Disraeli put it. Only one person at a time can occupy the top, and certain things cannot be known or done by those who never get there.
Disraeli practically invented the long game, which McCarthy mastered. Disraeli reached the top of the pole — prime minister — twice: once for months, once for six years. That was enough to make history. Disraeli bought nearly half of the total shares in the Suez Canal and dominated the Congress of Berlin in 1878 that propped up Europe for another 35 years before disaster hit. McCarthy is unlikely to do anything as dramatic, but he is the leader of a great political party in a mighty nation — and as such, he will touch history.
“The base” — if rightly defined as genuine Republicans of long and deep commitment — is applauding his success.
Fifteen ballots over four days matters not at all in the long game. Indeed, those votes taught McCarthy who his friends are, whose influence is rising and whose is waning, and how to tell the principled from the pathetic among his caucus critics.
Now the House GOP, led by McCarthy, must prepare for the shutdown battles. Roy fought McCarthy for rule changes that will put the national debt front and center. Roy will never stop talking about the debt and never should. After a fight on the debt ceiling, there will be fights over the budget.
McCarthy won because enough Republicans know the value of their party and the work that it takes to build it. By contrast, the holdouts who voted “present” even on the 15th ballot had no agenda and certainly no gratitude. They stood for themselves and only themselves, powered by venom and oblivious to the real world’s opinion of their character and motives.
As the new speaker distributes the fruits of his long struggle, McCarthy won’t be “punishing” anyone. He will be rewarding those who appreciate the value of political parties. McCarthy will be “in the room where it happens,” to borrow from the musical “Hamilton,” while those six Republicans who took the low road will never get close. A principled path was marked for them by the genuine conservative, Roy. They chose the path of preening.
In his well-earned delight at reaching the top, McCarthy might go easy on those who tried to tarnish his win out of spite.
The party will not forget.