From George Washington’s alleged inability to tell a lie about cutting down his father’s cherry tree to Donald Trump’s tally of more than 30,000 false or misleading statements over his four years as president, the perception of politicians in America has rightfully slid into skepticism as a starting point.  
And skeptical could be the word to describe the mood in Bakersfield, which over the past week has seen an unprecedented series of events befall one of its local products: Kevin McCarthy. On Tuesday, McCarthy (R-Calif.) became the first House Speaker in U.S. history to be removed, after he made a deal with House Democrats the previous Sunday to avoid a government shutdown.  
 
“He’s nobody I voted for,” resident Dan Bingham told SFGATE during a Saturday morning doughnut run on Coffee Road just a stone’s throw from McCarthy’s alma mater Cal State Bakersfield. “He wins overwhelmingly in this district. He’s very conservative. It seems like he pushed himself into that role. All the finagling he did to get himself into that role, it seemed pretty obvious that something was going to happen.” 
 
Bingham’s right. Even getting to the speakership took McCarthy, 58, some doing: 15 tries, the most “rounds of voting … since before the Civil War,” according to CBS News. And his reign wasn’t a long one: McCarthy’s 269 days as speaker represent the third-shortest time in that position in American history. You’d have to go back to 1869 to Theodore Pomeroy, who served only one day as speaker on the last day of the 40th Congress, to find the most recent shorter turn with the gavel. 

In a sense, McCarthy is identified with Bakersfield. His family ran a two-store mini chain of eponymous frozen yogurt shops here in the 1980s. And McCarthy’s own rise is something of a fairy tale that has its origins in running a small business: In November 2010, the Los Angeles Times reported that McCarthy, who was then fresh off an appointment to become the House majority whip, had a success story attributed to luck and fate. 
 
“At age 20, McCarthy won $5,000 on the first lottery ticket he had ever bought,” the Times reported. “He invested it in the stock market and used the money he made to open a deli, Kevin O’s. 
 
“It was ‘the city giving me a problem about how long I could hang my sign’ that got him interested in politics. He eventually used the proceeds from the deli’s sale to put himself through Cal State Bakersfield.” 
 
Was this true? As with most politicians’ folksy stories told and retold, the answer is, well, sort of.  

In February 2018, the Washington Post did a comprehensive fact check of McCarthy’s deli ownership claims and found that McCarthy’s oft-told story had more holes than a good loaf of sourdough.  
 
“I opened my own deli, it was like Subway before Subway, even built the counter in my dad’s garage,” McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal on June 16, 2015. “And I did it for two years and I was pretty successful. I now had enough money that I could pay my whole way through college. …So I sold my business.”

McCarthy has used the story often — a relatable vehicle to share his sympathetic tale in any given situation. He told the Faith and Freedom Coalition in 2011 that it “taught me about regulations; taught me about every person I hired, I paid as much Social Security as they did; taught me those challenges I never forgot.” 

He told the City Club of Los Angeles in 2015 that it was about entrepreneurship and overcoming obstacles because “no one really sells a 19-year-old a franchise.”

As part of a 2012 weekly Republican address, it was about being the little guy: “As a former small-business owner — a deli here in Bakersfield — I know that there is risk involved in turning a new idea into a successful business. There is no reward without some risk.”

“The truth is, Kevin McCarthy has been a federal or state government employee for his entire adult life beginning with working in Rep. Bill Thomas’s district office from 1987 to 2002,” Washington Post reader Michelle Pettigrew wrote. 
 
Along with her comments to the Post, Pettigrew included a 1986 review of Kevin O’s by long-tenured Bakersfield Californian food critic Pete Tittl. Tittl’s Feb. 21, 1986, review said Kevin O’s “is located in a corner of McCarthy’s Yogurt. … The full official name is Kevin O’s Delicatessen but that’s an exaggeration. The deli is only a counter and refrigerator in McCarthy’s dining room.”

Did the deli ever really exist as a stand-alone business? The Washington Post fact-check unearthed no ownership records for Kevin O’s Deli in Bakersfield. One of the McCarthy’s yogurt shops, called McCarthy’s Yogurt and Deli, was sold to Ron Russell and Perry McMasters on April 6, 1989, according to a bulk transfer record unearthed by the Post.  

“McMasters, who grew up in the neighborhood, said he would travel on his bike every day to the yogurt shop as a teenager and remembers the deli as an 8- by 10-foot section of McCarthy’s Yogurt, with a Telly Savalas poster hanging up,” the Post reported.  
 
As for the lottery ticket that allegedly started it all, the California Lottery started on Oct. 3, 1985 — five months before Tittl’s review — when McCarthy was 20 (he has previously said he was 19 when the deli opened). “You know, I started my first business when I was 19 years old,” McCarthy said during a 2016 speech on the House floor.

While Bakersfield has been experiencing demographic shifts and gains in population, McCarthy’s homespun story of the deli — which is a combination of luck, loose facts and folklore — seems to still do the trick here, for the most part.  
 
“He so strongly represents what seems to be the core of Bakersfield.” Bingham said. “I do think it is changing, but it’s a really slow change. My household, my wife and I, as registered Democrats, we’re like a crazy minority.

“We joke a lot. It’s assumptive. People are assumptive here. Like literally it’ll just be like — a stranger will talk to you, disparagingly, of the left and it’s like, ‘Of course you agree with me because I’m from Bakersfield.’ It’s an anecdote, but that’s the push here — just still overwhelming support.”   

A Google search Friday for Kevin O’s deli directed me to the Countryside Market & Deli on Coffee Road in Southwest Bakersfield. The small store, with its even smaller corner deli counter, seemed to fit the description of Kevin O’s. However, I was quickly told by the store’s owner, Nimi Brar, that this was not, in fact, the place.  
 
“What do you mean? This opened in ’96, it was called Brookside Deli first,” Brar said. “It’s never been anything else.” 
 
In spite of not being the former home of McCarthy’s deli, Brar did weigh in on the recent headlines made by his representative. 
 
“It’s embarrassing, especially for the Republican Party,” he said, “that’s my take on it. They should realize what they had, now they’ll get some crazy in there. It’s bad for the Dems too, they’ll get someone like Taylor Greene or Gaetz in there. 

“Kevin wasn’t a bad guy, but the problem is now he looks bad.” 

Brar’s comments may have been prescient as reports surfaced Friday that McCarthy was considering resigning. McCarthy himself soon rebuffed those notions. “I am not resigning. I got a lot more work to do,” McCarthy told the Capitol Hill press corps.
 
“I’m curious whether his losing the speakership will change his standing here as a candidate,” Bingham said, noting that we live in a time where reality doesn’t need to line up in order for people to keep their points of view intact. “But the truth has been pushed down so much it’ll probably be spun as: ‘That’s what happens, another good one getting taken down.’”