News Analysis: McCarthy's once formidable powers of persuasion couldn't stop a humiliating, historic defeat
Kevin McCarthy's long career has been about calculating the odds and working the backrooms, but those traits, which barely won him the House speakership earlier this year, were not enough to stop several far-right Republicans from pushing him out of the job he had craved since he was a young California assemblyman from Bakersfield.
The vote Tuesday to oust McCarthy was a humiliating and historic defeat that revealed the limits of his formidable powers of persuasion while further exposing an increasingly divided and rancorous Republican Party whose extremists have broken the bounds of convention for a radical agenda against President Biden that has no use for what they describe as McCarthy's conciliatory — and weak — nature.
McCarthy is a politician of affability and a master of fundraising. He is also a man of pliable principles and a tactician who can delineate the percentages and voting patterns (R-Fla.), is too detrimental in an era when politics is less about compromise than it is about intransigence and bloodsport.
