McCarthy is a man of indistinct calculations — “I don’t think being a congressman is going to define me,” he says cryptically — but he has won over the freshmen by making his own goals and beliefs beside the point. He recruited many of them, anointed them Young Guns and nurtured them during the 2010 midterm election cycle. Rather than being pawns in some kind of Karl Roveian überstrategy to achieve lasting Republican pre-­eminence, the freshmen represent McCarthy’s more entrepreneurial approach to politics: seize upon a trend (in this case, government phobia), put all your money on it and then work hard to make the trend last. And like an entrepreneur, he casts the considerable strategic risk — that his troops are unseasoned, volatile and perhaps far out of the mainstream — as a virtue: “I believe we’re serving in a different time and place. Unconventional is positive. Unconventional gets rewarded.”

Sometimes late at night, the freshmen will drop by McCarthy’s other office, the one reserved for the majority whip behind a door marked H-107 on the first floor of the Capitol. The whip’s office is the unofficial retreat for the House Republicans — but particularly for the freshmen, 19 of whom bunk in their own offices across the street. Ostensibly, they amble into H-107 to filch one of McCarthy’s granola bars or to get some information on a pending legislative matter. The likelier reason is to relieve boredom or loneliness or the desire to duck out of sight for a while. At times the corporate-­flophouse panorama resembles an airport frequent-flier lounge, complete with beer and wine. “This is what I want,” McCarthy told me. “I want them living in this office.” More to the point, he wants them to feel a connection to what his office and the Republican leadership are up to. The walls of H-107 subliminally reinforce this sense of belonging, covered as they are with framed images of freshmen alongside senior members, all in black and white like statesmen from some nobler era.

McCarthy suspects that he has an addictive personality, and it’s probably for the better that he shuns caffeine. Still, the substance he craves is human interaction. He never sits alone in his whip’s office with the door closed so as to summon thoughts or shut out the world. He never eats alone. If invited to a social function, he never fails to drag along at least one colleague. The floor of the House is his neighborhood bar: he sits down to chat with the freshmen women, then jumps into the aisle to receive Duffy’s volley of rabbit punches, then collars the liberal Democrat Dennis Kucinich to compliment him on his appearance on “The Colbert Report.” (“I didn’t know you were a ventriloquist! Pretty cool!”) Bill Thomas, McCarthy’s mentor, spent many hours talking with McCarthy about the tax code. But, Thomas says, “he was more interested in people — that was his forte, you could say.”

Routinely, during the day, McCarthy gathers some of his Republican colleagues in the conference room of H-107 to decide how they’re going to save America. In previous months, these “listening sessions,” as McCarthy calls them, focused on the Republican budget legislation written by Paul Ryan and taken to the House floor in April. The initiative would shrink the percentage of federal nonsecurity discretionary spending (relative to gross domestic product) to pre-Great Depression levels, convert Medicare to a sort of voucher system, shift more of the cost of Medicaid to states and preserve the Bush tax cuts for wealthy Americans. Several of the more senior members worried that the Medicare provision in particular was going too far. (McCarthy’s chief deputy whip, Peter Roskam, says, “One of them said, ‘It’s been great serving with you — I’m going to be a former member of Congress.’ ”) The freshmen overwhelmingly supported what Ryan was up to — to the extent that McCarthy and the House Budget Committee chairman would murmur to each other: “Wow. We can go further on entitlements. If we don’t, these guys probably won’t even support the bill.”

In the end, all but four Republicans voted for the Ryan budget plan. Immediately after the vote on April 15, Ryan sought out the whip on the House floor, shook his hand and told him, “Your listening sessions made the difference.” But a month later, a reliably Republican seat in the 26th District of New York fell in a special election to Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who campaigned relentlessly on her opponent’s support of the Ryan plan. Exultant Democrats (and some moderate Republicans) think that the House conservatives disastrously overreached and that the 2012 election will now be about — as Nancy Pelosi brazenly put it a few of weeks ago — “Medicare, Medicare and Medicare.” The Republican leadership sees it differently. A recent Bloomberg poll shows that a majority of Americans support cutting government spending and taxes. (The same poll indicates that far more Americans fear a full Republican takeover than a second Obama term.) With few exceptions, the freshmen have shown surprising poise and resolve after encountering anti-Republican “Mediscare” activism at their town-hall meetings. It’s for this reason that McCarthy believes the public will ultimately reward his party’s show of political fortitude. “We put our ideas out there,” he says. “They haven’t. That gives us protection.”

Of course, the current topic in H-107 has been the debt ceiling, the legal limit that the federal government is authorized to borrow, and which Congress has raised largely without incident 10 times in the past decade alone. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has said that the government will be unable to meet its financial obligations by Aug. 2 unless Congress permits it to borrow more. The freshmen have not been shy on this subject, either. McCarthy informally polled them when they first came to town in November for orientation. All but four of them said they would vote against raising the ceiling, under any circumstances. Then McCarthy (along with Ryan and the House Ways and Means chairman, Dave Camp) began conducting more listening sessions. The whip recognized that it would be counterproductive to lecture the freshmen about the economic hazards of not raising the debt ceiling. He also realized that it’s one thing to pass a budget — which in the end is a nonbinding political document — and another thing to throw America into default. And so McCarthy has urged them to consider raising the ceiling under certain conditions and thus to view this moment as a golden opportunity to force significant changes from the White House. “We all ran for a reason,” he tells them. “What’s most of concern to you? What is it that we think will change America?”

As a result, the freshmen have begun to move away from a hard “no” on raising the debt ceiling to a “yes, if.” In the conference room, several freshmen have said they’ll vote to raise the ceiling only if the president agrees to repeal his health care legislation. Or if Obama signs into law a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, after all 50 states have ratified it. Or if he’ll agree to mandatory caps on all nondefense spending. Or if he’ll enact the Ryan budget. The whip writes down all their ideas on a notepad. He never tells them that they’re being unrealistic — that two-thirds of the Senate and three-fourths of the state Legislatures are unlikely to pass a balanced-budget amendment. McCarthy’s indulgence of their ideas isn’t just a patronizing gesture, however. Already in the budget talks supervised by Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats have signaled that they’ll agree to deep cuts and possible entitlement reforms — the kinds of concessions they would never have made on their own. By staking out a position far to the right, the House Republicans are tugging the White House and the Senate much farther in their direction than almost any Washington insider would have predicted. They’re winning, in other words. The question is whether McCarthy can convince the freshmen and their Tea Party benefactors to see it that way.