No one in America is going to change their mind about anything because Kevin McCarthy won’t be Speaker of the House.

If you listened to the political media, though, you might have been under the impression that something had gone horribly wrong because the House Majority Leader made the surprise decision to withdraw from the race for speaker, leaving Republicans to scramble for a candidate. Yet this is the kind of messiness we should expecting from our most democratic institution. The House is where public sentiment first manifests. And public sentiment—on the Right, and probably in most corners of American political life right now—isn’t in the mood for coronations.

Nevertheless, nearly the entire political media treated a healthy instance of intra-party debate as a failure of governance. Upsetting the status quo (if it’s Republicans, at least) is treated as turmoil rather than change.

Karen Tumulty actually wrote these words inThe Washington Post:

Less than a year after a sweeping electoral triumph, Republicans are on the verge of ceasing to function as a national political party.

Chaos! A failure to partisan lockstep is tantamount to anarchy. Majorities in the House and Senate are now useless. You know those 31 Republican governors and 31 GOP-controlled legislatures? Dead. Lincoln’s party is over because it couldn’t agree on a speaker this week. We’ll see if Tumulty is right, but every time they tell me the GOP is dead, conservatives end up on the winning side of a wave election a few months later.

In the real world, this is all far less dramatic. There are many reasons floating around about McCarthy’s change of heart, but here’s how CNN put it:

A source close to McCarthy told CNN the decision to drop out came down to ‘numbers, pure and simple,’ adding that ‘he had the votes to win the conference vote, but there just wasn’t a path to 218′ — the number of votes needed to lock down the speakership on the House floor.

For whatever reason, he didn’t have the votes. Don’t worry, Republicans can find 50 other politicians with the exact same skill set to take his place. Yet, McCarthy told National Review Online he doesn’t believe the House is “governable” anymore. “Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom,” he added, offering us a peek into the conceit of someone who believes everything will fall apart if he’s not in leadership.

Fact is, Republicans have gained 69 House seats since Barack Obama became president. That hardly sounds like rock bottom to me. Many of those seats were won without any help from Republican leadership in Washington. Some of the victims of conservative success have been Eric Cantor, John Boehner, and now McCarthy. So perhaps the majority leader meant that so-called institutionalists were hitting rock bottom.

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