Did Washington underestimate Kevin McCarthy?

The superlatives may be a little over the top, but McCarthy’s allies have a point: The national press and much of official Washington appears to have underestimated the man.

McCarthy has never enjoyed much esteem in certain corners of Washington — Politico once ran an entire article about how reporters thought he wasn’t particularly smart. And from the moment the Californian first picked up the gavel, he was widely written off as a historically weak leader, a speaker “in name only” who appeared unequipped to manage his party’s slim, 5-seat majority. To win his new perch in the face of right-wing opposition, he’d given up much of its formal power, agreeing to rules that would hand GOP hardliners more say over what bills reached the House floor and allowing any one member to call a snap vote to oust him if they felt he stepped out of line.

The New York Times warned that McCarthy had handed the GOP’s arch-conservative wing “the ability to hold him hostage” and that the country “should brace for the likelihood of a Congress in perpetual disarray for the next two years.” Many doubted he would be able to negotiate a debt ceiling compromise (our colleagues among them) and wondered if McCarthy might risk a default simply to keep his job.

By all accounts, the White House agreed. According to Politico, Biden aides largely believed that the competing demands of hard-right and moderate Republicans made it impossible for McCarthy to move a debt-ceiling bill with only GOP votes. So the president spent much of the year publicly refusing to even discuss the issue with McCarthy until he passed a spending plan of his own, assuming the speaker would fail and be forced to cave.

Instead, McCarthy pulled off a legislative two-step, forcing Biden to the negotiating table by rallying Republicans behind a deeply partisan bill hardliners would agree to, then keeping the right on board just long enough to hash out a viable compromise. Conservatives may be unhappy with the final bill, but for now there doesn’t appear to be any serious effort to topple McCarthy.

Senior Republicans said McCarthy succeeded in part by bringing some of his antagonists from the speaker’s race into the decision-making process, including by placing three hardline conservatives onto the prestigious Rules Committee. Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, the panel’s chair, told Semafor that working closely with conservatives like Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian known for bucking leadership who ultimately backed the bill, helped them “identify problems early.”

“He’s really built the team where rank-and-file members feel ownership of this body and these work products,” Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota told Semafor.

House Republican leaders have exaggerated some of their wins in the debt ceiling deal, which in many ways looks like a relatively normal budget agreement. McHenry has called it the “largest deficit reduction package in American history,” for instance, which as a Republican budget expert put it, is “not remotely true by any measure.” On the left, meanwhile, some commentators have suggested Biden outplayed McCarthy by keeping Democrats’ concessions to a minimum, and possibly slipping in a small expansion of the food stamp program.

Maybe. But McCarthy has shown he can govern effectively without kowtowing to the GOP’s hard right — no easy feat in the modern Republican party. A hostage, he was not.