BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — Outside Dagny’s Coffee Co., a downtown cafe that serves as a kind of crossroads for a broad swath of Bakersfield, Katherine Haas, 38, was trying to make sense of Kevin McCarthy’s stunning ouster as House speaker this week. But she wasn’t viewing it through the lens of the bitter infighting of Washington. She was thinking of his representation of the increasingly diverse city of 400,000 that watched as he built a political career through the sheer force of his affability and
Bakersfield, Calif., became more diverse and culturally expansive while the former House speaker was increasingly caught up in Washington’s barbed politics.