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Kevin McCarthy Drops Out of House Speaker Race
Shocking development in the race to replace Speaker of the House John Boehner:
Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has dropped out of elections for House Speaker, shocking Capitol Hill and raising questions about who can possibly lead the House Republican conference.
Republicans were to meet Thursday at noon to elect a new Speaker. Instead, they received the surprising news from McCarthy.
McCarthy dropped out of the race because he did not believe he could reach the 218 votes needed in a public roll-call vote on the floor later this month to be elected Speaker, according to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who spoke to reporters after the GOP meeting adjourned. Issa said McCarthy gave that message to his colleagues, and that McCarthy did not believe he could unite the conference.
McCarthy had struggled to win over conservatives, and while he was the favorite to win the closed-door vote, conservatives insisted he did not have the votes on the floor to win election.
Upon stepping aside, McCarthy did not give his blessing to either remaining candidate: Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah or Rep. Daniel Webster of Florida. The Hill article quotes a Louisiana congressman who now thinks five of six new candidates might decide to run for Speaker.
Published in General
Hillary had a campaign commercial out of it within hours. It would never have gone away.
The sad thing is that he clearly didn’t mean to actually say the whole purpose was political. It was a classic gaffe.
McCarthy shouldn’t get all the blame.
The Republicans who said we shouldn’t try to fix ObamaCare, that we should instead let it hurt Democrats in the elections, were establishing a pattern of thought that some of us were denouncing for its cynicism, saying it would have results like this.
Yet McCarthy is out of the running, while Karl Rove still has his column at the WSJ. (I don’t know the degree to which Rove was involved in this thinking at this time and am not going to look it up, but this stuff about how X will affect the elections is a consistent theme of his.)
I don’t think that’s clear at all. The quote gets even worse when you hear it in full context, because he talks about how he’d be a leader with a plan to fight, and then he went into the Benghazi committee. Made it sound purely political.
Transgressive, even.
He’s obviously talking about the political impact of the Benghazi committee. But he doesn’t say, and I don’t think he meant to imply, that Clinton didn’t do anything worthy of investigation.
One moral is that politicians as a rule should simply avoid talking about the political horserace implications of what they do, with rare and obsessively careful exceptions. He didn’t need to discuss Clinton’s numbers anyway.
Always remember: Democrats have priorities and concerns, but Republicans “seize” on an issue. If you don’t believe me, you can google for it.
Conservative media: Democrat Eats Puppies!
Mainstream media: silence
Conservative politicians: Shame on Democrat for Eating Puppies!
Mainstream media: Are Republicans Overreacting to Democrat Eating Meat?
But he opened the quote with (words to the effect of) “You have to have a plan”, immediately following that with talking about the Benghazi investigation’s impact on Clinton’s poll numbers.
This is that rare case of a gaffe where it gets worse when you take his words IN context!
Yes, I’m not saying that as a gaffe it was less bad than reported.
But the Democrats are playing it as proof positive that there’s nothing actually there — or at least that McCarthy admits as much — and though he played into their hands and made it possible to interpret it that way, it’s no such thing. McCarthy did not say or mean that there was nothing legitimate for the committee to investigate.
It was bad enough to legitimately play a major role in forcing him out. I’m not arguing that the aftermath has been unduly harsh. Just musing about the nature of politics, where one ill-considered statement with obvious but unforeseen ramifications can have brutal consequences.