Whatever you may think of Mitch McConnell, he's a shrewd operator. He's made plenty of mistakes, but he did condemn Trump after Jan 6th, whereas McCarthy continues to kiss Donald's ring.
McCarthy stands for little except for being a great fundraiser for the party. That's not enough. Good riddance I say.
Many think the inability of the Republicans to elect a leader is a sign of weakness. Probably, but it's also an opportunity to get a leader who stands for something. Otherwise, Reagan conservatism is dead?
PS. Just in! Kevin just lost his 8th round. He tried making concessions to opposition and got slammed. For god's sake, I can't watch much more of this. Throw in the towel already.
The Tragedy of Kevin McCarthy
He’s very good at winning elections but doesn’t have what it takes to be a great legislative leader.
By Will Hurd, WSJ
Jan. 4, 2023 6:05 pm ET
It’s hard not to see the predicament of Rep. Kevin McCarthy as a tragedy. A man who was heralded 15 years ago as a new brand of conservative leader, who set records for fundraising, and who helped get candidates elected all over the country now has had to suffer through successive failures to become speaker of the House.
Mr. McCarthy was a co-author, with future Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, of “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders” (2010), which criticized earlier Republicans, particularly on matters of the federal budget. They wrote that Republicans were “arrogant and out of touch” and suffered “failures from high-profile ethics lapses to the inability to rein in spending or even slow the growth of government.”
Yet as a lawmaker, and in four years as minority leader, Mr. McCarthy showed no particular legislative interests and had no signature achievements. He would have been the perfect Republican National Committee chairman, a job that’s concerned only with building the party and winning elections. As a leader in Congress, he needed to demonstrate that he could effectively legislate and govern as well.
Winning elections is the first step to good governance. Effective policy and legislation is the next. Too many politicians have forgotten over the past decade that good policy is good politics. An effective lawmaker or statesman has to focus on more than the X’s and O’s of elections.
Mr. McCarthy repeatedly tried to placate bomb throwers in his own party, who were never going to be happy with anything less than complete capitulation. He bent over backward to please a vocal minority while taking for granted that the reasonable majority of his party would remain loyal. He even exhibited such on the eve of the speakership vote. Instead of staying firm and backing the wishes of the rational wing of the party, he caved in to the demands of his opposition on issues like making it easier to “vacate the chair”—the legislative process to remove the speaker. He was willing to weaken the speakership to win it. If he’d spent more time working with rational lawmakers to get like-minded candidates elected, he wouldn’t have ended up in this position.
The most glaring example of his appeasement: On the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. McCarthy reportedly spoke honestly to President Trump about the rioters in the Capitol: “They’re trying to f— kill me!” A few weeks later, to get back into Mr. Trump’s good graces, he changed his tune and went to Mar-a-Lago “to make peace with the ex-president,” as he told his colleagues.
Mr. McCarthy was only one of many Republicans who hitched their wagons to Mr. Trump. But the former president has repeatedly shown that he is a loser with a base that never grows, and that trusting him is a fool’s errand. By following him, Republicans lost the House in 2018, the White House in 2020, and the Senate in 2020 and again in 2022. He was a major contributing factor in preventing a red wave last year. The result was a House majority so slender that a few extremists had the power to deny the speakership to the man Mr. Trump once called “my Kevin.”
Mr. Hurd, a Republican, represented Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, 2017-21. He is author of “American Reboot: An Idealist’s Guide to Getting Big Things Done.”
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