ADVERTISEMENT

Opinion Kevin McCarthy and the price of power for its own sake

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
77,134
58,316
113
By Ruth Marcus
Associate editor |
January 5, 2023 at 1:41 p.m. EST
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) enters the Capitol on Jan. 5. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Listen
5 min

Comment
183

Add to your saved stories
Save

Gift Article

Share
“I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on th’other.” William Shakespeare, “Macbeth”
Kevin McCarthy is no Macbeth, but Shakespeare surely knew the type, willing to take desperate steps in pursuit of power. In McCarthy’s case, the desperation takes the form not of killing the king but of humiliating himself in his quest for the House speaker’s gavel.


Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates

McCarthy’s vaulting ambition alone hardly sets him apart. But two things make this episode especially cringeworthy: first, that McCarthy seems to crave power for power’s sake, not for any higher purposes; second, that he is willing to debase himself so completely to obtain it.

Ambition is a complex force, omnipresent, essential — and treacherous. “We see too little as a failing and too much as a sin,” Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode wrote in her 2021 book on the topic. “We dismiss those who lack it and despise those who misuse it.”





No successful politician — perhaps no successful leader in any field, but certainly not one in an arena as ego-driven as politics — suffers from an ambition deficit. There is no shame in ambition. Yet its presence requires masking or disguise to be truly effective. Ambition unvarnished leaves a sour taste, and ambition untrammeled leads to spectacles like the one now unfolding in the House of Representatives.
Matt Bai: McCarthy is the last of three little pigs. He’d best start packing.
And that is the paradox of ambition: Individuals need that drive to succeed. But taking ambition too far, succumbing too fully to its demands, ends up doing more to destroy reputation and legacy than to enhance them.

This is the Kevin McCarthy story.
Image without a caption

Follow Ruth Marcus's opinionsFollow

On one level, McCarthy represents an archetype of the ambitious politician, not an extreme. Consider Joe Biden’s lifelong quest for the presidency, the ultimate political prize. He ran two unsuccessful, even humiliating, races for the presidency before finally succeeding, and then only after embarrassing losses in early 2020 contests. Nor is Biden an outlier. “A man stung by the presidential bee contracts an incurable disease that only embalming fluid can cure,” FDR adviser Harold Ickes said of New York Gov. Thomas Dewey in 1949. McCarthy was simply stung by a different species of bee.






Still, there is something particularly humiliating about the McCarthy episode — seven failed roll call votes and counting. “Well, it’s Groundhog Day,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) said Wednesday in nominating McCarthy for the sixth vote on the speakership.

As Cammack spoke, McCarthy stared stoically ahead, knowing the outcome this time was equally doomed. In the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray as weatherman Phil Connors manages to escape a seemingly endless time loop by changing himself and becoming a better person. McCarthy makes no such pretense.
Jeff Greenfield: It’s still Trump’s party, even if he can’t elect McCarthy speaker
His goal is not to be a better McCarthy — or, more grandly, to build a better House. He simply seeks to wear down — or placate — an opposition trying to escape its own Groundhog Day. A man who puts party first would not put his party through this. A man with a stronger sense of self would stop and ask whether the job was worth the price.





“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” a 23-year-old Abraham Lincoln said in 1832, running for his first political office. “I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”

If Lincoln was posturing, at least he had the good sense to wrap his ambition in grander terms. McCarthy’s peculiar ambition appears to be entirely tautological: He should have the speakership because he deserves it, not because of what he wants to do with it. “I earned this job,” he told House Republicans behind closed doors Tuesday, before the balloting began.
In a sense, he did. But he has paid a heavy price in its pursuit. McCarthy swallowed his post-Capitol riot qualms about President Donald Trump — “I’ve had it with this guy” — to seek Trump’s backing, not that it seems to have helped much. He conceded and then conceded even more to the GOP hotheads frustrating his bid, including making it easier to oust him — or whoever is ultimately chosen — from the speakership. If he wins the crown, it will lie uneasy from the outset.
Macbeth must kill and keep killing to slake his ambition. McCarthy must concede and concede even more to slake his own.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Chishawk1425
ADVERTISEMENT