Ambition keeps him loyal to Donald Trump. But what does Kevin McCarthy stand for?
Kevin McCarthy was weeks away from the biggest election of his life when he pulled up to Don’s Machine Shop in Pennsylvania. It was the sort of place campaign consultants crave, a factory with 35 workers founded in 1981 in a one-car garage with a milling machine and a lathe. The business has since grown to 100,000 square feet. Not far from Joe Biden’s birthplace in Scranton, it made the perfect setting to attack Democrats for ruining America.
Tanned and dressed in a blue suit, the California Republican, who is likely to be the next speaker of the House, stepped out beneath an American flag. He shook hands with workers and kids, a woman on crutches, a man wearing a Trump hat. He was not rushed. A naturalness lifted off him, an ingratiating sense that after he was done, he might stroll over to the local VFW hall, have a beer and reminisce about high school sports or whose sister just got married.
McCarthy was there to inspire on that September day. But — as sometimes happens with the congressman — a phrase in his speech lacked the poetry he was reaching for: “The electric cord of liberty still sparks in our hearts.”
The line drifted for a moment and thudded into a list of grievances. It was emblematic of a politician with rhetorical shortcomings and no grand vision for a troubled nation. Despite his 1.6 million Twitter followers, McCarthy is analog in a digital age. He is affable, if at times self-deprecating and contradictory. He is intimidated by hard-right radicals and has passed no landmark legislation. He has soared through the ranks largely untested in the art of bipartisan deal-making — evident in his failed battle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to put his slate of Republicans on the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
“He’s all hat, no cattle,” said one former Republican congressman. “Blatantly transparent.”
But McCarthy’s ideological flexibility and his fraught, often humiliating efforts to manage Donald Trump have made him an asset to House Republicans as they head into the Nov. 8 midterm elections. He is a master at the machinery of electoral politics. Perhaps no one in Washington is more attuned to the races playing out across this clamorous land. He has traveled to dozens of states since August and raised far more money than Trump has for his fellow Republicans this cycle. When most of his colleagues are sleeping, McCarthy is likely flying over some starlit corner of the republic, mapping out designs to elevate himself and return his party to power.
A skilled pragmatist and an establishment politician, he is navigating the crosscurrents of a viscous new America while holding together a fractious and combative caucus that encompasses the incendiary fictions
