As speaker bid falters, mixed views of McCarthy in hometown
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) — House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy’s political troubles don’t stop at the Washington Beltway.
In his conservative, Central California hometown of Bakersfield – where oil derricks blanket hillsides and country music fans flock to Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace hall – some voters are asking if what has become an embarrassing bid to succeed Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came at the expense of the twin engines of the local economy – oil production and agriculture.
McCarthy hails from a conservative, inland region of California far from the liberal strongholds of San Francisco and Los Angeles that doesn’t figure in the California Dream myth of fast fame and easy living. Farming and oil pumping shape the economy — on a recent rainy morning in Bakersfield, fields of oil tanks, warehouses and the leaping flames from a refinery's gas flare stood out against a coal-colored sky.
Outside Ethel’s Old Corral café in the city’s Oildale neighborhood, oil field worker Zane Denio said he wasn’t following McCarthy’s day-to-day travails on Capitol Hill as he attempts to take Pelosi’s gavel. For a third consecutive day Thursday, McCarthy failed to win enough Republican votes to claim the job, leaving his future prospects uncertain.
The registered Republican has voted for McCarthy in the past, but next time? That “depends on who is running against him,” Denio said. “I think he’s just another politician. That’s the bottom line.”
Denio said he cares about the oil industry and its good-paying jobs, but he sees them under constant attack from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democratic-dominated Legislature pushing the state toward a green energy future.
Wearing a broad-brimmed cowboy hat, boots and sunglasses as the sun broke through a stormy sky, Denio...