Archive

Posts Tagged ‘Kevin McCarthy’
November 28th, 2011 at 3:11 pm
Young Guns Now in Charge

Fred Barnes has a great article in The Weekly Standard about how the trio of Republican House members his magazine first dubbed “Young Guns” back in 2007 is now perhaps the single weightiest force in Washington Republican politics. The three are Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy and Paul Ryan. “Cantor is majority leader, McCarthy is Republican whip, and Ryan is chairman of the House Budget Committee and the leading Republican voice on domestic policy,” Barnes wrote. ” [….] They knew Republicans had lost their way, ideologically and politically. And they were eager to promote House candidates from diverse backgrounds, with little or no political experience but a zeal for bold conservative reforms. ‘We focused our effort,” Cantor says, “on recruitment of people who wanted to run for the right reasons’.”

Now I haven’t always liked what Cantor, McCarthy or even Ryan have done or said, but for the most part, they (especially Ryan) have been tremendous forces for a revitalization of the GOP as a party of new ideas and bold, serious proposals.  But the key, bigger point emerges from this Barnes explanation: “[T]heir political skills were complementary: Cantor the party leader, McCarthy the strategist, and Ryan the policy thinker.” One of my biggest complaints through the years has been that far too few conservatives married practical politics well with policy expertise, and that fewer still knew how to breed those two skills together to produce something that looks good and will sell well in the public arena.

The next best thing to having one person able to do all three is to have one person who is really good at one or two of them and also wise enough to affiliate himself with the right person or people to do whichever of the other three functions at which he might be lacking.

Alas, it has been decades since we have seen a Republican presidential nominee even come close. Hence the clamor earlier this year for Ryan himself to enter the fray.

The search continues. But Barnes’ article well identifies not just the players but the troika of required skills. It’s well worth a close read.

November 11th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
Re: House GOP Leadership Team Taking Shape
Posted by Print

Ashton makes a good point about the geographic diversity of the GOP House leadership in comparison to its Democratic predecessor. Another interesting addition may be Kristi Noem, the incoming freshman who will serve as the At-Large Representative for South Dakota and who looks to be in line to fill a new position being created to give some leadership representation to the burgeoning ranks of Tea Party-affiliated conservatives. Noem is attractive, articulate, and has a compelling biography. She looks to be a definite rising star in the party.

I think the mix of the two parties may be reflective of what caused the Democrats to go astray in the past few years. Looking at the new Republican leadership, only Texan Jeb Hensarling comes from a state where Republicans are reliably strong in both federal and state elections. Democrats, on the other hand, populated their leadership ranks with figures from the deepest of the deep blue states. They governed that way too. And in so doing, they forgot all the lessons that gave them control of the Congress.

In the 2006 and 2008 election cycles, Rahm Emanuel in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate gave considerable flexibility to their recruited candidates, allowing them to run with conservative positions on a host of issues that allowed them to escape being tarred as liberals in the Midwest, the South, and the Mountain West. While they succeeded in getting a large percentage of those candidates elected, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid agenda then lurched so heavily to the left that the new members had to run for reelection in the shadow of a record that undermined all their pretensions of moderation.

The facile interpretation of this trend is that a party always has to govern from the center to keep its majority. That’s also the rationale for liberals like  E.J. Dionne, who hope that the new conservative majority’s stand on principle will alienate them from the electorate. In his most recent column, Dionne writes:

Give Republicans credit for this: They don’t chase the center, they try to move it. Democrats can play a loser’s game of scrambling after a center being pushed ever rightward. Or they can stand their ground and show how far their opponents are from moderate, problem-solving governance. Why should Democrats take Republican advice that Republicans themselves would never be foolish enough to follow?

This is what happens when a static mind attempts to comprehend a dynamic landscape. The problem with Dionne’s analysis is that he assumes the left and the right are equidistant from the center. This is false. When Gallup polled the question in June, 42 percent of Americans identified as conservative, 35 percent said they were moderate, and 20 percent said they were liberal. That means the self-identified center-right represents an astonishing 77 percent of the country. By contrast, the center-left at its theoretical apex is only a slight majority of Americans. When you then factor in that 56 percent of independents broke for Republicans this year — and that that represented a 36 point swing from 2006 — you see how steep the hill is for Democrats.

Dionne and his counterparts in Congress need to learn the lesson: in a center-right country, it’s more important for Democrats to moderate than Republicans. If you doubt that, ask Bill Clinton — he might remind you that he’s the only Democratic president to be elected twice since FDR.

November 11th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
House GOP Leadership Team Taking Shape

With Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announcing the end of her campaign to be Republican Conference Chairman, the likely top four House GOP leadership spots look like this:

(1)   Speaker – Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)

(2)   Majority Leader – Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)

(3)   Majority Whip – Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

(4)   Conference Chairman – Rep. Jeb Hersarling (R-TX)

It’s always interesting to see where leadership team members are from because it indicates where the strength of the party lies.  Since leadership positions are sought and won by members with multiple terms in office, it’s intriguing to see four Republicans representing each corner of the country.

Contrast this with the locations represented by the outgoing top four House Democrat leaders:

(1)   Speaker – Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

(2)   Majority Leader – Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD)

(3)   Majority Whip – Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC)

(4)   Caucus Chairman – Rep. John Larson (D-CT)

Aside from Clyburn, all the Democrat leaders come from deep blue coastal states (e.g. California, Maryland, and Connecticut).  Counting Clyburn, the Democrats’ claim to a “southern” voice is tied to a gerrymandered district designed to elect a liberal African-American.  If Hoyer beats Clyburn for the Minority Whip post, even that fig leaf of regional diversity will blow away.

The House Democratic caucus lost 29 of 57 “blue dog” members last Tuesday, making the remaining chamber membership much more liberal.  It also wiped out the Democrats’ claims to represent regions other than the high-tax, morally bankrupt coasts.  That, combined with Nancy Pelosi’s likely retention as caucus leader, will make it substantially more difficult for the party to recruit viable candidates in 2012.

Conservatives shouldn’t count on gifts like this forever, but for now, we’ll gladly take them.