John Boehner’s trail:
Speaker’s political career began at a homeowners association.
WASHINGTON — The “regular guy with a big job” has seemed at the center of palace intrigue forever.
There was nothing regular about John Boehner’s rise and fall and rise and fall in the House, nothing constant except his tan and the smoke-filled rooms wherever he was allowed to light up.
Boehner’s announced exit as House speaker and from Congress altogether caps a political career that began as the head of a homeowners association in an Ohio neighborhood and made him second in line to the presidency.
An opponent of abortion rights, he was essentially undone by disaffection from conservatives who want to push an antiabortion struggle over Planned Parenthood financing to the point of closing the government, a step too far for him. He was once one of the agitators — a member of the Newt Gingrich Gang of Seven who seized the Republican congressional agenda, then the reins of House power, in the 1990s. He was ultimately undone by Tea Partyers and other conservatives he’d kept in line as speaker for nearly five years — barely, and at a cost.
The 65-year-old was never one to hold back his exasperation with recalcitrance in his own ranks as well as frustrations with what he saw as a slippery negotiating partner in President Obama.
In 2008, leading House Republicans in the minority, he lectured members to get off their “dead asses.” He accused Obama of moving goalposts in budget brinkmanship and trying to “annihilate” the GOP.
Obama had his own frustrations with the speaker, although his most memorable line about Boehner was a tease about his tan. “He is a person of color,” Obama cracked in 2009, suggesting a common racial heritage. “Although not a color that appears in the natural world.”
Boehner summed up the lawmakers he was overseeing this way in 2011 to the Wall Street Journal columnist and Ronald Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan: “We got some of the smartest people in the country who serve here, and some of the dumbest. We got some of the best people you’d ever meet, and some of the raunchiest. We’ve got ’em all.”
Still, he loved the institution and brought a poker-face demeanor to it, though with heavy eyes that welled up at the slightest poignant moment. The House speaker has been called House Weeper.
Over the years, no one has been more moved by Boehner’s life story than himself. If you could take the man out of the Ohio bar where he swept floors, you couldn’t take the bar out of him.
Second oldest in a Catholic family of 12 in the Cincinnati suburb of Reading, Boehner worked his way through university and climbed the ranks of a plastics and packaging company. Boehner succeeded in state politics and won election to the House in 1990.
There he soon became a lieutenant of the rabblerousing Gingrich, who as mid-1990s speaker steered him to No. 4 in the House leadership.
He won election in February 2006 as House majority leader, the No. 2 spot, then became the top Republican, in a minority, after Republican losses that fall. Republicans then sealed his from-the-bootstraps climb when the 2010 elections handed them the majority, and made Boehner speaker.