As he prepares to leave Congress and head back to the California district he’s represented since 2007, Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy may be anticipating that he’ll be well-received by his constituents.
But based on a fascinating report from Andrew Gumbel of The Guardian, many residents of the district — the largest city of which is Bakersfield — aren’t exactly eager to see McCarthy back in in their midst.
“If you went through the wringer he went through, I suspect there’s a little humiliation, a little embarrassment. Maybe he’s licking his wounds and wants to go off into the sunset,” said Greg Perrone, president of the Greater Bakersfield Republican Assembly, an activist group that hews to McCarthy’s right. “Still, I’m a little disappointed that he didn’t finish the term that he was elected to serve. That’s not what we expect from our elected leaders.”
Consider some of the letters to the editor of The Bakersfield Californian, many of which are filled with stinging rebukes of McCarthy, including calling him quitter for retiring early.
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Kevin,” two of them wrote last week. One added: “You haven’t represented us in a very long time.”
Even Bakersfield mayor Karen Goh gave McCarthy the back of her hand, saying she was “too busy” to provide even a brief quote regarding the former speaker.
Some in the district complain that McCarthy has never been interested in their needs and has instead spent most of his time in other parts of California in an effort to raise fundraising dollars for himself and the GOP, which doesn’t exactly do them any good.
McCarthy’s district, California’s 20th, extends well beyond Bakersfield into the farmlands of Kern and Tulare counties and into the suburbs of Fresno, the largest city in the Central Valley. It was redrawn before the last election to make it more solidly Republican, relieving McCarthy of any significant pressure to fight for his own congressional seat. He scarcely visited during last year’s campaign, focusing instead on raising hundreds of millions of dollars for more competitive districts in California and the rest of the country.
For his part, McCarthy is making it clear he’s still interested in politics on a national level, especially if a future Republican president has a cabinet post that needs to be filled by an insider who has lots of contacts in Congress and can always be counted when it comes time to ask donors to write a check or two for the GOP effort.
Historically, McCarthy will go down as a lesson in the personal greed for power that drove both his rise to the top and the crash that left him as little more than a historical footnote who is only interested in what he can do for himself.
