Kevin McCarthy may have groveled before Trump but he outsmarted President Biden | Opinion

When Kevin McCarthy became Speaker of the House of Representatives on the 15th ballot at 1 am Eastern time on January 7, he gave an address to restive House members that concluded with these famous lyrics about his hometown of Bakersfield:

“Hey, you don’t know me, but you don’t like me/Say you care less how I feel/But how many of you have sit and judged me/Ever walked the streets of Bakersfield?”

One might dismiss McCarthy’s homage to the words of fellow Bakersfield son, the late country star Buck Owens, but let’s consider Bakersfield as a metaphor. The city that bred McCarthy is as an arid counterpoint to the sunny beaches and beautiful people of Los Angeles and the high-tech wealth of Silicon Valley. It’s been called an “armpit” of California with a high crime rate, a meth problem, bad air and a history of serial killers. In other words, Owens and other Bakersfield country stars had plenty of material.

Opinion

In Congress, the GOP House conference is full of nuts, political arsonists and Donald Trump sycophants. Imagine walking the figurative streets of such a community as your day-to-day job - a place that in the last decade chewed up and spit out two conventional-yet-effective Republican Speakers in John Boehner and Paul Ryan.

Boehner stepped away as Trump was remaking the GOP in his own anti-Democratic image and as “Freedom Caucus” Trump followers with no acumen or concern for governing were hurling figurative bombs at the governance system created by our Founding Fathers.

After working with Trump for two years, Ryan saw the trajectory of a GOP aircraft with Trump in the cockpit pushing the yolk into a speeding nosedive. He packed a chute and bailed out before the crash.

That left McCarthy as the next man up to lead what is quite possibly the most dysfunctional conference ever. He had cultivated a relationship with Trump by leaning into obsequiousness to such a degree that Trump affixed McCarthy with a nickname that one might give a dog: “My Kevin”.

It was at this time that McCarthy was subjected to bitter derision from the mainstream press, pundits and professional “Never Trump” Republicans like the Lincoln Project. They derided McCarthy for aiding and abetting Trump.

They weren’t wrong. McCarthy as we once knew him in Sacramento, when he served ably in the legislature, became an alternative version of himself who was driven to grovel before Trump

To say this was frequently uncomfortable for those of us who know him is the ultimate understatement.

The seditious riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, appeared to finally be McCarthy’s breaking point, or perhaps, his path to reclaiming the McCarthy we thought we knew. He privately called Trump’s actions “atrocious and totally wrong,” and declared that Trump “incited” the attack on the Capitol.

That didn’t last long. Soon enough, it was clear that Trump was maintaining his standing with GOP voters, which meant he was maintaining his standing with a majority of the GOP conference. McCarthy could have walked away but instead, he went to Mar-a- Lago to kiss the Trump ring.

This was an awful moment in American history. I would have been proud of my friend if he had walked away. That would have been a principled decision founded on protecting the rule of law and our Constitution from Trump, a belligerent narcissist with a fetish for fascists.

But if McCarthy had walked away on principle, someone else would have made that trip to Mar-a-Lago. Someone else would have become Speaker. It probably would have been someone less dedicated and capable of making the House work as needed.

It was painful and humiliating, but McCarthy secured the gavel. Both the liberal The Atlantic and conservative National Review dubbed him a “speaker in name only.” Cable talking heads and podcasters could only say McCarthy’s name through dismissive sneers.

Then came the recent debt ceiling crisis and low expectations for McCarthy to succeed in getting a deal while holding onto the Speakership. McCarthy would have to thread the thinnest of needles and when President Biden would not negotiate a deal and demanded a “clean” debt limit raise, McCarthy outflanked him by passing a limit raise with spending cuts. He set the table and Biden had to eat at it.

Over the weeks of negotiations, McCarthy objectively won the messaging battle by demanding spending reductions. His approval ratings rose. Biden’s lagged. On the final deal with Biden, McCarthy outsmarted the fringe wing of the Republican caucus and even rolled Trump, who encouraged a default.

McCarthy won. More importantly, Americans were saved from a fiscal disaster. A divided government worked correctly through compromise, just as the Founding Fathers imagined it.

None of this excuses McCarthy’s past offenses. Rather, consider that the reality of governing through our terribly broken politics isn’t simple and we should be grateful when it works as it was designed through negotiation and compromise.

Think what you will of McCarthy, but back to our metaphor, “how many of you who sit and judge him ever walked the streets of Bakersfield.” It was better to have McCarthy walk those streets than many others.

Rob Stutzman is president of Stutzman Public Affairs and served Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as deputy chief of staff for communications.