Among the various reassessments of Kevin McCarthy following his successful debt ceiling negotiations, the one with the widest implications belongs to Matthew Continetti, who writes in The Washington Free Beacon that “McCarthy’s superpower is his desire to be speaker. He likes and wants his job.”
If you hadn’t followed American politics across the last few decades, this would seem like a peculiar statement: What kind of House speaker wouldn’t want the job?
But part of what’s gone wrong with American institutions lately is the failure of important figures to regard their positions as ends unto themselves. Congress, especially, has been overtaken by what Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute describes as a “platform” mentality, where ambitious House members and senators treat their offices as places to stand and be seen — as talking heads, movement leaders, future presidents — rather than as roles to inhabit and opportunities to serve.
I agree with this completely. One of the weirdest things about American politics since Gingrich has been the number of Senators and Congressmen who openly despise Congress and show no particular interest in the work it does. John Boehner found it almost impossible to lead his Republican troops because so many of them simply did not care if bills or budgets got passed. But McCarthy and Biden do seem to be different:
The platform mentality seemed likely to imprison McCarthy as well, but he’s found a different way of dealing with it: He’s invited some of the bomb throwers into the legislative process, trying to turn them from platform-seekers into legislators by giving them a stake in governance, and so far he’s been rewarded with crucial support from figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, the quirky Kentucky libertarian. And it’s clear that part of what makes this possible is McCarthy’s enthusiasm for the actual vote-counting, handholding work required of his position, and his lack of both Gingrichian egomania and get-me-out-of-here impatience.
But McCarthy isn’t operating in a vacuum. The Biden era has been good for institutionalism generally, because the president himself seems to understand and appreciate the nature of his office more than Barack Obama ever did. As my colleague Carlos Lozada noted on our podcast this week, in both the Senate and the White House, Obama was filled with palpable impatience at all the limitations on his actions. . . . Whereas Biden, who actually liked being a senator, is clearly comfortable with quiet negotiation on any reasonable grounds, which is crucial to keeping the other side invested in a deal. And he’s comfortable, as well, with letting the spin machine run on both sides of the aisle, rather than constantly imposing his own rhetorical narrative on whatever bargain Republicans might strike.
In my lifetime there have two major types of American politician: grandstanders with big ideas who don't trouble much over details like passing budgets, who tend to be loved by their fans and hated by their enemies, and sausage-making brokers around whom an aura of corruption has often hung. We need big ideas and soaring speeches, but we also need people willing to take on the enormous work of governing. Like Douthat, I find it cheering that Kevin McCarthy has turned out to be an effective dealmaker, and that new populist Senator J.D. Vance has been working both sides of the aisle to get support for railroad safety reform. As for Biden, of course, this was always pretty much his only selling point: that he was a reliable mainstream Democrat who could do the work of legislation and budgeting without too much drama. He may end like the first George Bush, not much admired while in office but inspiring nostalgia the next time we fall into angry partisan gridlock.
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