He raised the money. He logged the campaign miles. He walked the halls in a crisp suit with a salesman’s gleam. But this week Kevin McCarthy ran headlong into the most perilous challenge of his career when rebellious Republicans unleashed a crushing battle that nearly denied him the speakership of the House and underscored the deep rancor within his party.
McCarthy had sought the speaker’s gavel for decades. Every wrinkle and twist of his career — from a young California assemblyman to minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives — telegraphed his ambition. Some found him earnest, others calculating and duplicitous. But few believed the man from Bakersfield, California, with the firefighter father and the high school sweetheart wife would be denied.
He wasn’t forsaken in his quest, but his dream came at a humiliating cost that called into question his hold over the party. McCarthy’s powers of persuasion, his stock-in-trade congeniality, were not enough to get through the first 14 rounds of voting, revealing as much about the highly charged nature of American politics as it did about his willingness to compromise principles and bend to concessions forced by the party’s small but potent band of disruptors and election deniers.
