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An unlikely Pickings today with just two items; from the New Yorker and National Journal of all places. We have not gone over to the dark side. The New Yorker piece is a very fair portrait of John Boehner and others in the GOP leadership. The National Journal article looks at the leadership of both parties. Pickerhead is still trying to understand what has happened at The New Yorker. That magazine has been so reliably obnoxious for years it seems strange to have a political subject treated impartially. You will learn a lot.
In the New Yorker, Peter Boyer profiles the new House speaker John Boehner. Boyer also tackles the recent history of House Republicans, and how the reinvigorated conservatives and Tea Party members may effect needed changes.
John Boehner’s introduction to the political force that would make him the Speaker of the House of Representatives came on a cool April afternoon in 2009, on the streets of Bakersfield, California. Boehner, the Republican House leader, had come to town for a fund-raiser for his colleague Kevin McCarthy, who represents the area. The event was scheduled for tax day, April 15th—the date targeted for a series of nationwide protest rallies organized by a loosely joined populist movement that called itself the Tea Party. One rally was to take place in Bakersfield, and Boehner and McCarthy decided to make an appearance. “They were expecting a couple of hundred people,” Boehner recalls. “A couple of thousand showed up.”
The two congressmen witnessed a scene of the sort that played in an endless loop across the country for the next eighteen months: people in funny hats waving Gadsden flags and wearing T-shirts saying “No taxation with crappy representation,” venting about bailouts, taxes, entrenched political élites, and an expanding and seemingly pampered public sector. (Noticing an open window in a nearby government office building, some in the Bakersfield crowd shouted, “Shut that window! You’re wasting my air-conditioning!”) Although Bakersfield is in one of the most conservative districts in California, the Tea Party speakers assigned fault to Republicans as well as to Democrats. The event’s organizers had been advised that Boehner and McCarthy would be there but did not invite them to speak.
For Boehner, the Bakersfield rally was a revelation. “I could see that there was this rebellion starting to grow,” he says now. “And I didn’t want our members taking a shellacking as a result.”
Back in Washington, Boehner reported what he’d seen to his Republican colleagues. While many Democrats and the mainstream media mocked the Tea Party, Boehner pressed his members to get out in front of the movement or, at least, get out of its way. “I urge you to get in touch with these efforts and connect with them,” he told a closed-door meeting of the Republican Conference. “The people participating in these protests will be the soldiers for our cause a year from now.”
Boehner seemed an unlikely clarion for an anti-establishment revolt. He had been in Congress since 1991, during the Bush-Quayle Administration—long enough to have twice climbed from the back bench to a leadership position. He was a friend of Ted Kennedy’s, and a champion of George W. Bush’s expansive No Child Left Behind legislation. After the economic collapse of 2008, he had reluctantly advocated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“a crap sandwich,” he called it), the Tea Partiers’ litmus test of political villainy.
But Boehner was among the first Beltway Republicans to recognize that the rise of the Tea Party represented, for Republicans, a near-miracle of good luck. …
…Boehner is a delegator, but he is given credit by some conservatives for taking on the Republican appropriators in the House last year on the issue of earmarks. He has shunned earmarks for his entire career in Congress, and he insisted upon the gesture of a Republican moratorium on the practice. “He stared the appropriators down, and he won,” Patrick McHenry says. “And I don’t know the last time that appropriators have been beaten.” …
… Boehner forbade a Republican victory party on November 2nd, and has since signaled that he means to play the “adult” card in his dealings with Obama and within his own House conference. It is the strongest play he has. Unlike Gingrich, Boehner is not a visionary; his politics were formed by his revulsion, as a small businessman in Ohio, at the size of his tax bill. Nor is he an extemporaneous rhetorician; in public appearances, he rarely strays from his script. Where Gingrich was at once the Party’s chief political theorist, strategist, and messenger, Boehner is happy to delegate those roles to the young comers around him: Eric Cantor, the next Majority Leader; Kevin McCarthy, who will be the Republican Whip; and Paul Ryan, the G.O.P.’s designated thinker on the big issues, like entitlement reform. “We have very different personalities and different styles,” Gingrich told me recently. “You have to measure Boehner against other Boehners—you can’t measure him against me. Boehner would tell you up front that he’s not attempting to be the defining figure of this moment. He’s trying to be the organizer of the team that may define the moment. Clinton was able to pivot with me because I was a large enough figure that Clinton could say to the left, ‘You really want Gingrich?’ And they’d go, ‘O.K., even though we’re really mad at you, we’re not that mad at you.’ This may be an argument for the Boehner model.”
Boehner is now the most important Republican in the country, but far from the best known, which carries some advantage. Washington is familiar with him as an amiable, somewhat prosaic conservative with an umbilical connection to business, an old-school pol who loves his golf, his wine, and his cigarettes. His physical aspect—the mahogany skin tone, the smoky baritone, the Ken-doll coif, and the impeccably dapper attire—lends itself to caricature with a throwback theme. (Dean Martin and Don Draper are two press favorites.) Lately, Boehner has taken to reciting his personal biography, perhaps partly to counter the caricature, but also as a device for framing his approach to the job as the uncomplicated application of ordinary American common sense. “Trust me—all the skills I learned growing up are the skills I need to do my job,” he says. …
…The test of Boehner as Speaker will be how the Republican majority decides to interpret that tentative mandate. One reading is that voters were alarmed by a government stuck in overdrive, and elected Republicans in order to slow it down. As a Boehner adviser put it, “The country is saying to all of us, ‘Stop. Just put the gun down and walk away.’ ” Boehner leans toward that interpretation, which dictates a particular approach: an effort to achieve things that might be broadly considered sensible, doable, and practical, like the earmark moratorium. If Boehner gets his way, there would be reforms of the institution itself that, if they worked, might tend toward greater caution on spending. There would be an effort to pass elements of the Pledge to America, such as a rollback of government spending to 2008 levels, and there would be extensive use of the congressional-oversight function.
Kevin McCarthy’s revolutionaries are unlikely to embrace that approach. “They didn’t come to Washington to tinker around the edges,” McHenry, one of the conservatives who have most eagerly welcomed the newcomers, says. “They came to cut the size of government, not to trim its growth.”
The next Congress will also be a test of the Young Guns, two of whom—McCarthy and Cantor—carry rank on Boehner’s leadership team. I asked the third, Paul Ryan, what he thought of the prospect of a go-slow approach. “I could not disagree with it more,” he said. “I am so sick of playing small ball. That’s why I stepped out there with the Roadmap in the first place. The country doesn’t deserve small ball. The country deserves real answers to the enormous problems facing us. And we owe it to our employers, the people who elected us, to give them a choice of two futures. Look, we know where the left wants to go, we know the path that we are on. We owe it to the country to show them an alternative path, based upon our principles. And if, after getting a second chance, we blow that opportunity, then shame on us.”
Ryan noticed that, during the campaign, the complimentary remarks about his reform ideas from President Obama and other Democrats were replaced by criticism of his entitlement plan as a risky scheme. Republicans, too, shied from Ryan’s politically toxic pet subject, even while positioning him to amplify his arguments (he’ll be chairman of the Budget Committee). Ryan believes that the incoming Republican freshmen will ally themselves with him. “We’ve got different people coming to Congress than we have had in the last number of cycles,” he says. “We’re not getting that many career politicians and wannabes. We’re getting a bunch of cause people. And these are cause people who will be fresh out of the experience of being hit by this’’—campaign attacks over proposed entitlement reforms—“and who will have survived those hits.”
Ryan credits Boehner for giving him rein on an issue that many of their colleagues would prefer him to be less insistent about. “He’s never asked me to stop it, he’s never asked me to tone it down,” Ryan says. “He’s never asked me to jettison these things. I think he realizes the kind of class we’ve got coming in, and the kind of times that we are in.” Ryan’s first important task in the 112th Congress will be writing the 2012 budget, which will define the Republican agenda. “I will have to write a budget that can pass,” he says. “I can’t tell you what that is going to look like. I can tell you that it is not going to raise taxes, and it’s going to cut spending. And we are going to have to begin to have this conversation on entitlements.” It is likely that the Rivlin-Ryan plan, rejected by the Obama deficit commission, will find its way into Ryan’s budget next year. …
Charlie Cook writing in National Journal, says the Dems can’t fix a problem they won’t admit to.
…The public certainly hasn’t forgiven Republicans for their mistakes over the last decade. But the loss of confidence in Democrats has been more immediate and more relevant than Republican miscues when they had both the White House and majorities in Congress. There were plenty of things that voters held against the GOP, including scandals, the decision to invade Iraq, the case of Terri Schiavo, and the doubling of the national debt. None of these were forgiven but they were all less relevant.
Americans see Democrats as having failed in their stewardship of the economy. A recession grew worse, unemployment soared, and Democrats seem to have checked the box and moved on to issues nearer and dearer to their hearts.
For some reason, climate change legislation and health care seemed to be more important than sticking to a focus on the economy through 2009 and into 2010. It might be a while before voters forgive the president and the remaining Democrats in Congress for that.
One of the more interesting things that seems to be happening behind the scenes among Republican leaders in both the House and Senate is their focus on the mistakes made by the Republican majorities after their takeover in 1994.
The freshmen and some of the younger Republicans certainly have their hubris, but the leaders seem to know that they scored an unearned run in this election and that they have been given an opportunity that they probably didn’t deserve. Nonetheless, they are determined not to blow it.