McCarthy In The Middle: How The Last ‘Young Gun’ Sought To Rebuild Conservative Trust As Pelosi Went Scorched Earth

It’s mid-September and Kevin McCarthy has baseball on the brain. 

Aaron Judge, he predicts, is “gonna set a record for home runs.” Plus, brags McCarthy, “he’s from the San Joaquin Valley.” The Yankees outfielder hails from Linden, California, 200 miles up Highway 99 from McCarthy’s hometown of Bakersfield. 

The Valley may be fertile, but it isn’t the California most Americans know unless they read John Steinbeck or listen to Buck Owens. McCarthy thinks the region exports plenty of talent alongside all those grapes. Judge, as the House minority leader sees him, is one of many high-achievers from the Valley — not unlike Frank Gifford, Earl Warren, and Merle Haggard (with whom McCarthy proudly shares a high school). 

From a stately leather chair in his office, McCarthy says people from the Valley, California’s forgotten heartland, “know we’re going to have to work harder.” 

“When people think of California, they think of Los Angeles or San Francisco,” he explains. Referencing “Grapes of Wrath,” McCarthy gestures with his hands to show where farmland nestles between mountain ranges. “This is where people went when things didn’t work right. But they can only make it by hard work,” he says, bursting with all the exuberance of a small-town mayor. 

The very next day, Judge beamed a pitch deep into left-center. It was his 60th home run of the season, tying Babe Ruth’s record. By October, he’d surpassed Roger Maris, hitting more home runs in a season than any other player in American League history.  

Uncharted Territory

McCarthy is on the precipice of history, too. Republicans are projected to win back the House of Representatives in a matter of weeks and the Boy from Bakersfield is expected to become speaker of the House — albeit speaker of a very different body than the one he first joined in 2006. You can chalk those differences up to radical changes ushered in by Nancy Pelosi and frenzied Trump-era Democrats. 

Though she’s from the same state, Pelosi represents San Francisco, a very different cultural crucible than the Central Valley. Where McCarthy is still fighting to earn respect, she is a media favorite, inspiring hagiographies and memes and naked devotion from the press corps. Now, even anti-establishment Republicans are likely to help elect an establishment fixture as the leader of their caucus, in no small part because of Pelosi’s scorched-earth tenure. McCarthy’s improbable path to the gavel is not one the legacy press is ready to tell. 

While he’s busy consolidating support, reporters are wondering, as Politico wrote earlier this year, whether McCarthy is “a great big dummy.” But if his speakership seems like a sure thing, that’s only because McCarthy is pulling off the political equivalent of a tightrope walk over the Grand Canyon, balancing the competing interests of a changing party without slipping into the abyss. 

Previously an ally of GOP establishment stalwarts such as John Boehner and Paul Ryan, McCarthy is on remarkably good terms with most of his caucus, including the GOP’s right flank. This