LETTER FROM SAN FRANCISCO
From Bakersfield, his hometown in the California of oil and dust, Republican Kevin McCarthy has come a long way. The trouble for the Democrats is that he does not intend to stop there. Since entering politics, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, now 57, has had one goal: to become its speaker. A function that concentrates power and pageantry. In the United States, the speaker (or president) is the third person in the state.
The chair has been occupied since 2019 by Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to seize – twelve years earlier – the hammer, the prerogative of the function and symbol of her authority. Kevin McCarthy can’t wait to take it from him. “I want you to see when Nancy Pelosi hands me that hammer, he launched in August 2021 to a group of elected officials from Tennessee. It’s gonna be hard not to hit her with it. » Faced with protests, he apologized, while regretting that we could no longer joke. Nancy Pelosi is not tender either. When Kevin McCarthy criticized her decision to reinstate masks in the halls of the House of Representatives, she called it a “moron” – as much to say of “cunt”. And she rarely jokes.
Rather described as an affable man, a good trader – he knows the names of all the candidates, that of their wives and even their dog – Kevin McCarthy grew up in Bakersfield. This city in the Greater Los Angeles area was the former point of arrival of the “Okay” at the time of the exodus towards California of the peasants of Oklahoma, ruined by the drought in the 1930s. His father was deputy chief of the fire brigade there. The young man studied marketing and politics with the young republicans, of which he was the leader.
More than a program man, he is a connoisseur of the electoral map. You have to hear him describe with delight his strategy for the 2020 elections. “Out of 152 million votes, we were 31,751 votes away from having a majority”he explained in March 2021 in the podcast of former speaker Newt Gingrich.
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McCarthy had a plan: He had studied the thirty Democratic-held constituencies in which Donald Trump had won in 2016, but where absenteeism had been significant two years later. “We found 8.5 million Americans who had voted in 2016, but not in 2018. We knew who they were, where they lived. » It was enough to approach them with more representative candidates: “Of the fifteen seats we won, the candidates were women or representatives of minorities. »
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