Kevin McCarthy’s Pyrrhic Victory
Kevin McCarthy finally has the job he’s dreamed of—chief of his Republican Party in Congress—yet it’s anything but his dream job. He is the leader of the minority in a legislative body in which the minority has no juice. He is not the speaker of the House.
So, I ask him, on a recent cold morning in the middle of the government shutdown—a confrontation in which his powerlessness gave him virtually no public role—with a fire crackling in his spacious office on the second floor of the Capitol, and a larger-than-life-size impressionistic portrait of Ronald Reagan staring down from the Williamsburg blue wall, “What’s second prize?”
McCarthy lets loose with a lengthy, unforced laugh before turning serious. “Well, it’s the old Hertz commercial,” he says. “We gotta try harder.”
Well, it’s the old Avis commercial, actually, but McCarthy’s rueful answer seems somehow appropriate, even a bit endearing, coming from a man who is often pigeonholed as a likable and ambitious, if not ready for prime time, leader. He made a candid point; it just didn’t come out of his mouth quite right. After all, this is the man who lost his chance to succeed John Boehner as speaker in 2015 in part because of his inelegant suggestion that House Republicans had launched hearings into the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, to drive down Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers.
It was also McCarthy
