With John Boehner stepping down as House speaker, House majority leader Kevin McCarthy of California looks like the likeliest candidate to replace him. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican, has already said he won’t run and has endorsed McCarthy. Texas congressman Jeb Hensarling could be a dark horse, but none of the other members of the House GOP leadership look particularly poised to take on the top role. McCarthy’s certainly the favorite, and even Boehner himself gave him his seal of approval.
“I think Kevin McCarthy would make an excellent speaker of the House,” Boehner said in his Friday press conference.
So what kind of speaker would McCarthy make—and how might he be different from Boehner? The answer may surprise conservatives quick to jump on the notion that the new boss is the same as the old boss.
McCarthy is pretty conservative.
One of the knocks against Boehner is that he wasn’t conservative enough for what is a very conservative group of House Republicans. By virtue of his leadership role, the same is assumed of McCarthy. “I believe in the individual,” McCarthy told me in an interview in his Capitol Hill office Thursday. “I believe in an individual’s right to determine his own outcome.”
McCarthy says the government telling individuals how to live their lives “goes against everything I philosophically believe.”
In his words, his own personal story is an example of the sort of individualist conservatism the GOP espouses. McCarthy took jobs in college to pay his way through school. On a road trip to visit friends at another school in San Diego, he stopped in a gas station and bought a lottery ticket on a whim. He won $5000, dropped out of school, and used the money to open his own deli.
“I didn’t want government telling me how high I could go or how far I could fall,” McCarthy said. He later sold the deli to go back to school, finished his degree, and got involved in GOP politics. Despite coming from a family of lifelong Democrats, McCarthy says he was “never” a Democrat and always considered himself a Republican.
“If anyone ever questioned me about my principles, I say, ‘Why would you ever question me? I wasn’t born into this. I chose this.’ I have a stronger belief in the fundamentals. of this party than I think anybody else.”
McCarthy is optimistic.
Boehner, for all of his strengths, could be a bit cantankerous, particularly when things got contentious within the conference. He was also overly lugubrious—the guy cries just about anytime he gets emotional.
Like his political hero Ronald Reagan, McCarthy is optimistic and has high energy, a permanent smile planted on his face. He takes more from the Gipper than just a sunny disposition. He says he came of political age in the Reagan era, and he keeps a giant painting of the president in his office.
“He talked about the shining city on the hill. I knew that was America. It was more than just an idea that it was going to be great for me,” McCarthy said, adding that the light Reagan talked about shone beyond America’s borders to inspire people all over the world. “But I believe that light’s been dimmed a little, so it’s our job to climb the mountain and recharge that light.”
For McCarthy, Republicans will succeed when they are more “optimistic” so that, in his words, voters look at the GOP and think, “What do you have, because I want to be a part of that.”
“We can’t say, well, I’m a Reagan Republican, without bestowing being an optimistic, happy conservative,” he says.
That, McCarthy says, is how you win, and win big. Pointing back to Reagan, he notes that, “you didn’t hear about different types of Republicans when he ran. You heard about the Reagan Democrats.”
Republican House members like McCarthy.
A hallmark of the Boehner speakership—and one of the reasons he cited for leaving the post early—was the contentious relationship he had with members of his own conference. His margin of victory in each speaker election was smaller than the last, and the latest effort to oust him by North Carolina Republican Mark Meadows seems to have worn Boehner out.
McCarthy won’t have that problem, at least not at first. A significant number of the Republican House conference members were recruited to run by McCarthy himself, who headed up party’s recruitment efforts in 2010. Where Boehner had no qualms with publicly blaming the more conservative members of the conference when they caused trouble, it’s in McCarthy’s nature to be more conciliatory.
On the opposite wall from his Reagan painting is one of Abraham Lincoln. His approach to conflict within the conference, he says, is “malice toward none,” quoting from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address. In McCarthy’s view, the conference, and the party, will be stronger with a more collaborative approach where each member feels a part of the process.
Another painting, this one in his large conference room that became a popular meeting place for GOP members after the 2010 election, captures McCarthy’s leadership philosophy. It’s a copy of Washington Crossing the Delaware, the famous Emanuel Leutze painting showing General Washington leading the surprise attack on the Hessians at Trenton. In Washington’s boat are 11 other people who represent the diverse elements of the American colonies, including a man wearing a Scotch bonnet, a black man, a woman in red, and a Native American.
“They were all rowing in the same direction,” McCarthy says. “We should not forget why we’re in the boat. We should not forget that we should all be rowing in the same direction and really why we got in the boat.”
McCarthy, or whoever becomes the next speaker, will not be able to start with a clean slate. I asked McCarthy of the likelihood of a government shutdown in the next week or so. He said he “didn’t think so” but that he wasn’t sure. After the Boehner news, he’d likely say the same thing: The discontent among House Republicans will not disappear overnight
But there’s no doubt a McCarthy speakership would be a shift in style and emphasis, and perhaps an opportunity for the restless conservative voice within the conference to feel like a part of the team again.
