‘Always underestimated’: Can McCarthy meet the moment?

Kevin McCarthy strides through the Bakersfield Marriott with a phalanx of security in tow, headed for the ballroom. Tonight, he is the highly anticipated keynote speaker of an annual fundraiser he never could have afforded to attend growing up here.

Some guests have come from the fields around town, where the cherry crop is in danger of failing amid heavy rains – an ironic twist, after years of water woes that have threatened the investment which generations of family farmers have made in this land. Others have driven in from the vast expanses of what was once America’s top oil-producing county, exchanging their fire-retardant plaid shirts and jeans for suits. They are farmers, oil men, and owners of small businesses that give Bakersfield a distinct local flavor.

These are people who know something about planting a seed and nurturing it to fruition. And of all the seeds Kern County has planted and grown, perhaps none has sprouted as tall as Kevin McCarthy, who as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives now stands second in line to the presidency.

“We’ve always been underestimated,” says Speaker McCarthy on his way to the ballroom, citing hard work and never giving up as key Bakersfield values that have shaped his career. “It’s kind of like what my father told me: ‘It’s not how you start; it’s how you finish.’”

Mr. McCarthy, a firefighter’s son who put himself through college and went on to discover a passion and talent for politics, adds that many also underestimated his ability to win back the House and be elected speaker. He did both, clinching the speakership in January after a historic – and some would say humiliating – 15 rounds of voting.

Those who have been close to him for decades say he pulled it off thanks to an innate grasp of political strategy, a knack for bringing people together, and an unparalleled work ethic, honed in this hard-working city far from the polished halls of Congress.

“A lot of times I think in D.C., everyone is looking for an ulterior motive,” says California state Rep. Vince Fong, who was his district director for nearly a decade. “What people don’t understand is that Kevin wants everyone to succeed.”

Others, however, say the choices he made to get to this point – including embracing Donald Trump and the ascendant “Make America Great Again” wing of the Republican Party – have left virtually no vestige of the Kevin McCarthy they once knew and admired.

“It’s striking how much he was willing to compromise to get a title,” says Republican strategist Mike Madrid, a former head of California’s GOP and co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project. He has known Mr. McCarthy since the 1990s and says he stood out as an “extraordinarily talented” politician but failed to demonstrate leadership in the critical days after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. “To me, it’s more of a Greek tragedy than anything else,” he says.

Just how much Speaker McCarthy has compromised, and to what extent he can tap his reputed talent for teambuilding to corral the GOP caucus on key votes, remains to be seen. No Republican speaker has ever been able to ride a tiger like this. As Mr. McCarthy enters the arena for his first high-stakes test, many in Washington are expecting not brilliance but a big thud. Some are even bracing for disaster.

With the country already $31.7 trillion in the red and on pace to hit the congressionally mandated debt limit by mid-June, Mr. McCarthy faces a difficult three-way negotiation among President Joe Biden, Democratic leaders, and his own caucus. Democrats are pushing to raise the debt limit sooner rather than later to avoid risking a national default. Republicans want to exact spending cuts that will help them balance the budget – something Mr. McCarthy promised to do within 10 years as part of his bid to become speaker. 

The spectacle of January’s speakership vote, which left him politically weakened, has lowered expectations even further. Indeed, Mr. McCarthy’s caucus may be impossible for anyone to hold together, as the GOP’s populist MAGA wing increasingly clashes with the party establishment on everything from defense spending to entitlements – and has few qualms about bringing Congress to a grinding halt, if that’s what it takes to rein in spending.

“There’s a faction of Republicans who are bent on pushing an ideological agenda at the expense of an institution,” says Jack Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College outside of Los Angeles. “It does not bode well for future votes on things such as the debt limit. He’s going to have a very difficult time, given how much he owes the hard-liners.”

Many see Speaker McCarthy as lacking the policy chops and command of legislative maneuvers that enabled his predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, to pull off major victories, even with a similarly narrow majority in the last Congress. And perhaps ironically for someone holding his title, he isn’t known for being particularly eloquent, though some chalk that up to a childhood speech impediment. Last summer, a Politico op-ed bluntly voiced what many congressional insiders had long asked privately: “Is Kevin McCarthy a great big dummy?”

Still, sometimes in politics, low expectations can be a blessing – reducing the pressure and allowing even modest victories to seem impressive.

Sometimes it helps to be an underestimated guy from an underestimated place. 

Back in Bakersfield 

Bakersfield, a city of just over 400,000 and growing, is the ninth largest in California but still has a small-town feel.

This is a place where people give generously to fundraisers, newcomers are asked, “How can we get you involved?” and most  functions start with prayer. There are virtually no major chain stores downtown, which instead features homegrown businesses like Dewar’s Candy Shop on California Avenue, where parents and their kids swivel on the pink stools at an old-fashioned soda counter set off by the black-and-white checkered floor.

It’s also an increasingly diverse city, with Hispanics now making up roughly half of the general population and a vast majority of the students in public schools. And while there is an idyllic sense of Americana downtown, there is a wide range in quality of life across the city. In the wealthier parts of Bakersfield, homes with manicured landscaping cost upwards of $1 million and many parents send their kids to private schools. As you traverse the city, past the memorial for Mr. McCarthy’s father at the Fire Department; past the speaker’s go-to lunch place, Luigi’s, where the little gravel parking lot is packed at noon; down to the jobs center and beyond, the crime rates steadily rise, property values drop, and achievement levels in public schools fall 20-35 percentage points below the state average, sometimes dipping into the single digits for math proficiency.

Indeed, some of the available data points paint a sobering picture.

According to a Guardian study published in March, the city – which is surrounded by mountains on three sides – has the worst air pollution in America. Kern County has California’s highest homicide rate – driven in part by rival gangs – and its second-highest poverty rate.

In January, Hulu released a docuseries called “Killing County,” alleging corruption in the Bakersfield Police Department. Many here perceived the three-part series, which was produced by ABC in partnership with former NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s documentary company, to be a politically motivated dig at Mr. McCarthy just weeks after he became speaker.

Still, this is home for him, a place where he can go to the gym or Luigi’s or catch a movie with friends. Where he can relax in the company of those to whom he has long been “our Kevin,” well before a certain president claimed him as “my Kevin.”    

Making friends along the way

As a kid, young Kevin would often tag along with his older brother, Mark, following him from the classroom to the sports field, recalls Mike Woessner, who taught both boys and had Kevin in summer school between 5th and 6th grade.

All along the way, he’d be making friends.

“He just had a gift of pulling kids together,” recalls Mr. Woessner. 

That gift continued freshman year on the football team at Bakersfield High School, where he played tight end.

Ahead of a game with another school that, unlike Bakersfield High, had a mainly white student population and was known for putting racist slogans on their helmets, Kevin and a couple other players took aside their teammate Marshall Dillard.

“I know what they’re all about,” Mr. Dillard, who is Black, recalls the future congressman saying. “But you know what, they’re not going to touch you – they’re going to have to get through us before they get to you. And they’re not going to get through us.”

They didn’t.

“That created a stronger bond on our team,” says Mr. Dillard, now principal of an elementary school just a few blocks from the Bakersfield High football fields.

The only person he ever saw Kevin afraid to approach was a girl named Judy in sophomore science class. He finally got up his courage, recalls Mr. Dillard, pulling out a June 1983 student newspaper showing Kevin and Judy crowned “best couple” senior year. They later married and raised two children in Bakersfield. “They have stayed together to this very day,” he says.

Mr. Dillard – named “most likely to succeed” in that same newspaper – went on to play football at Stanford. Mr. McCarthy went off to a local community college. Then he won $5,000 from the lottery, which he used to open a sandwich business in the corner of his uncle’s frozen yogurt shop. He later sold it and used the proceeds to help pay for college and graduate school at California State University, Bakersfield. 

He also found a new passion: politics.

“That’s all he would speak about,” says Mr. Dillard. “He had almost the same twinkle in his eye that he had for Judy.”

Mr. McCarthy applied for a summer internship with his local congressman, Bill Thomas, and didn’t make the cut. But then-chief of staff Cathy Abernathy offered him an unpaid fall internship instead.

“Usually, you have to keep telling the intern – would you do this, would you do that,” she says. Not Mr. McCarthy. He worked the phones and took case work upon himself. “If you come in with a problem, he’s going to try to make friends with you and he’s going to try to solve it,” recalls Ms. Abernathy. Back then, that meant calling bureaucrats 2,200 miles away and trying to get them to care about Californians’ concerns, so she would send him to Washington often to strengthen those relationships. “He was very effective with that,” she says.

And he recruited other young people to get involved, helping to build what Ms. Abernathy calls “probably the strongest Young Republican organization we’ve ever had here.”

Catherine Fanucchi, a family farmer who got to know Mr. McCarthy in high school, recalls how fractured young Republicans in California were at that time. Everyone had their pet issue. 

“And then in comes Kevin, and he was able to pull people out of their stuck-in-the-mud ideas to try and be a bigger party,” recalls Ms. Fanucchi, who roomed with Judy, Mr. McCarthy’s future wife, on their travels around the state for Young Republicans events and went on to become a lawyer and work in Congressman Thomas’ D.C. office. “That’s when I began to see Kevin shine.” 

A meteoric rise

From there, his rise was meteoric. Mr. McCarthy went on to chair California’s Young Republicans, then the Young Republican National Federation. After being elected to the state Assembly in 2002, his colleagues unanimously elected him as the Republican leader the following year. In 2006, when Congressman Thomas decided to step down after not being allowed to continue as the powerful Ways and Means Committee chairman, Mr. McCarthy was elected to fill his seat – and began moving into leadership positions on Capitol Hill within two years. He was seen as part of a new generation of conservatives, one of the Republican Party’s “Young Guns,” which was the title of a book he co-wrote with Reps. Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor. 

Throughout, he thrived on helping constituents, such as Mayor Dave Noerr of Taft, an oil town 40 minutes southwest of Bakersfield.

Mayor Noerr, who was first elected in 2004 and met Mr. McCarthy that year, says the then-state legislator had helped Taft avoid undue regulatory burdens on a largely dry creek bed, which first blocked the town’s plans to clear trees and shrubs out of it and later mandated expensive treatment for effluent from a federal prison.

“Speaker McCarthy helped me on that, as he has since then on many different issues,” says Mayor Noerr.

Half an hour south of Bakersfield, Ms. Fanucchi – who left Capitol Hill to return to farming years ago – pilots her pickup truck down muddy tracks and miles of roads, past the many crops she grows with her three cousins, including onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, and almond trees.

The road comes to a T in front of another farmer’s field, which is filled with uprooted almond trees, dragged into piles – a casualty of the irrigation challenges that have affected so many farmers here, she surmises. Elsewhere in Kern County, acres of citrus trees have been ripped out. It’s gotten so bad that some prominent farming families have decamped to other states. 

This is the southern tip of California’s Central Valley, which is home to more than 250 different crops and produces a quarter of America’s food, and Kern County alone also accounts for 70% of California’s oil. It is also a Republican heartland, where many feel state environmental policies – particularly on water and oil – hypocritically target two key sectors that fuel the upper-class lifestyles in California’s liberal bastions.

“They don’t like us because we’re conservative,” says Mr. McCarthy in a brief conversation before the fundraising dinner, noting that he grew up in a Democratic family with a dad who worked in government – but not a lavish position; he worked a second job moving furniture on his days off.

Democrats have controlled both chambers of the state legislature for all but two of the past 30 years. Today, Republicans have only eight seats in the state Senate (20%) and 18 in the state Assembly (23%). California hasn’t had a GOP governor in more than a dozen years.

The feeling many in Kern County have of being somewhere between forgotten and under siege helps explain the tight-knit nature of the place that forged Speaker McCarthy and his leadership style.

“We’re going to struggle, we have more challenges here. But we’re going to overcome it ourselves,” he says. “We come together.”

That feeling may also inform Mr. McCarthy’s innate understanding of grievance politics, as well as his appeal as a Republican who can fight for his constituents with above-average influence – including by bringing significant federal funding into his district.

In 2016, he worked with Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to pass the first major reforms to California water policy in more than 20 years – a sign, supporters say, of his willingness and ability to work across the aisle.

When California’s strongest earthquake in 20 years hit the town of Ridgecrest in 2019, Mr. McCarthy helped get $3 billion in government aid to repair a key Navy base there and also helped secure a federal disaster declaration that qualified residents for loans to rebuild their homes and small businesses. 

He obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to repair a major dam at Lake Isabella. He celebrated completion of the project at an April 4 ribbon-cutting – just in time to capture the melting of an epic snowpack. Now that water can be released gradually for city and agricultural needs, rather than emptying out into the Pacific, unused.

As a Republican, Speaker McCarthy doesn’t have nearly the sway at the state level that his predecessor, former Speaker Pelosi of San Francisco, wielded. Still, there is perhaps an advantage to being a Republican leader from a state where sweeping liberal policies are often test-driven to see whether they could be applied nationally: It has made him more attuned to how such policies can develop and gather momentum, says Ms. Abernathy.

“I think because Kevin sees all this, and knows how it could happen, he’s much more sensitive to what’s going on [in D.C.] – that we don’t let these little steps turn into where we are now,” she says. 

“Kevin saw something in me”

Early on in Mr. Fong’s career, with a master’s degree from Princeton and a couple of political internships with Congressman Thomas under his belt, he was thinking of going back to school for an MBA. Kevin McCarthy changed his mind.

“Kevin’s skill is to notice people’s gifts,” says Mr. Fong, who went on to run Mr. McCarthy’s first campaign for Congress, worked for him for years, and then got elected to the state legislature in 2016, where he still serves. “Kevin saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself,” he says.

That skill helps Mr. McCarthy rally others toward big goals, he adds – like when the congressman brought Mr. Fong and a few others with him to climb Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the continental United States, starting the 22-mile hike at 3 a.m. and unfurling an American flag at the 14,494-foot summit by lunchtime. 

“He was a great motivator and made you believe in yourself,” says Mr. Dillard of his football teammate. “What gets lost is his ability to create a team, people working together for a common good.”

After all, what good is it being super smart if you can’t win people over, points out Christy Kirschenmann Hornbuckle, who overlapped with Mr. Fong and Mr. McCarthy in Mr. Thomas’ office.

“A huge part of being a leader is getting people to follow you,” she says. “You can’t just stand up there and give the facts.”

One area where Mr. McCarthy has excelled is in recruiting and cultivating GOP candidates – and helping them win. Mr. Fong recalls texting him one afternoon during the 2022 campaign season and learning that he had had breakfast in Florida, lunch in New Mexico, and was headed to a dinner event in Nevada. 

Since first being elected to Congress, Mr. McCarthy would famously spend cross-country flights studying the Almanac of American Politics to get to know members and their districts. Mr. Madrid, the Republican strategist, says that he understands polling and precinct work on a level most politicians don’t.

So when the base started shifting toward Donald Trump, Mr. McCarthy was more tuned in than many. It also put him at the forefront of the battle for the GOP’s soul.

The MAGA effect

Mr. McCarthy was not an especially outspoken cheerleader of Mr. Trump early on, focusing more on the GOP’s agenda than its presidential nominee in a speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention. But he came to embrace the New York billionaire as an indispensable ally in the White House.

A pivotal moment came a week after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, when Mr. McCarthy said the president “bears responsibility” for the attack but opposed impeaching him on the basis that it would further divide the country. “As leaders, our place in history depends on whether we call on our better angels,” he said.

Two weeks later, he was on a plane to visit Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, in what was widely criticized as a capitulation after a short-lived display of moral courage.

His longtime mentor, former Congressman Thomas, implied he was a hypocrite in a long, frank TV interview, while one of his GOP recruits – former Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger – blamed him for resurrecting Mr. Trump’s political fortunes.

“The reason I have a special disdain for Kevin McCarthy is that he was a friend, and he obviously knows better,” Representative Kinzinger told TIME last summer, when he was serving on the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the attack. “He’s in a position to have a massive impact on what this country will look like and what the party will look like. And he has squandered that for his own political gain.”

Indeed, while some see Mr. McCarthy’s ongoing embrace of Mr. Trump as an extension of his career-long commitment to building relationships and never giving up on anyone, others say it’s a sign he’s lost his moral compass and was willing to do whatever it took for the job he had wanted for so long.

The speakership was almost his back in 2015, when hard-line conservatives in the Freedom Caucus abruptly forced out GOP Speaker John Boehner. But Mr. McCarthy stepped aside at the last minute, amid rumors of an affair with a congresswoman – which he and she both denied – and criticism over a quip he’d made that the Benghazi hearings had succeeded in hurting Hillary Clinton politically, seeming to acknowledge that that was the goal rather than simply getting to the truth.

In the nearly eight intervening years, Republican politics shifted dramatically, thanks to the populist forces that Mr. Trump rode to power and cultivated from within the White House. And Mr. McCarthy shifted with it.

Case in point: His relationship with right-wing firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, which has evolved to near-BFF status, just two years after he publicly condemned the Georgia Republican over controversial remarks she made before her election to Congress.

His lack of consistency has led critics to charge that he has no convictions. But that same malleability might ultimately prove helpful in corralling GOP votes. With his finger ever in the wind, it’s just possible Kevin McCarthy could wind up being more successful than some of his more ballyhooed predecessors at forging the kind of party unity that has frequently eluded today’s GOP.

Ultimately, supporters say, what matters are results. And they’re confident that, as he’s proven time and time again, Mr. McCarthy will deliver.

“It’s not the words [politicians] speak, it’s the deeds they perform that count with me,” says Annette Londquist, president of Bakersfield Republican Women. “And Kevin does that all the time.”