Boehner’s Army

John Heilemann, who co-wrote Game change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the race of a lifetime with Mark Halperin, a book that created quite a stir earlier this year, writes a political column for New York magazine. This one is subtitled The Republican revolutionaries have problems with authority—and that may provide Obama an opening.

John Boehner: “We must remember, it’s the president who sets the agenda for our government,” he said. And though two days later he suggested that Barack Obama was in “denial” about the meaning of the midterms, Boehner offered that he and Obama “get along well,” that maybe they could hold a Merlot Meeting (rather than a Slurpee Summit). “I don’t want gridlock,” he insisted. “I don’t want squabbling.” Mitch McConnell would never go that far, for fear that his pants would catch on fire.


But McConnell's stated primary goal is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.

That 1994 is much on the minds of Boehner and McConnell comes as no surprise—since for any politically sentient being, the analogy is inescapable. Most often, of course, the parallels are drawn to illustrate the challenge that Obama faces: Can he pull a Bill Clinton, tacking back to the center, triangulating his way to reelection? Yet as the two maximum Republicans are evidently aware, the historical antecedent raises an equally urgent question for the GOP: Can Boehner and McConnell avoid the sort of grievous errors that their forebears made, which opened the door to Clinton’s revival—and yet might do the same for Obama?

It's a big question. After his election, Team Obama seemed poised not quite invincible as much as on a winning streak, yet even with legislative accomplishments, it mired down in the politics of an angry opposition and a lost spin war. Now the President seems to be floundering, to be back on his heels. It remains to be seen how things will play out.

Comparatively speaking, Boehner and McConnell are peas in the proverbial pod. Both are Establishmentarians to their core, who see politics and their role in promoting Republicanism in similar terms.  They are not firebrands or visionaries, but they are bone-deep partisans. For the past two years, they have demonstrated enormous discipline and skill in working side by side in the exercise of obstructionism. And for the next two, they will both be afflicted with the same headache: managing the tensions not between their caucuses but within them, as each is simultaneously energized and roiled by the infusion of a new crop of members more populist and hard-line than the guys who ostensibly command them.

Both have to appear to be mindful of the tea party rhetoric, Boehner more so.

It’s this cadre to which Boehner was catering last week when he stated flatly that “we are going to repeal Obamacare”—an obvious impossibility given the remaining, if reduced, Democratic majority in the upper chamber and the president’s veto pen. This kind of talk will only get Boehner so far with the tea-partyers, however. His allegiance to their cause will be tested early, thanks to Michele Bachmann, who announced that she intends to seek a post in her party’s leadership: that of GOP-conference chair. Leadership fights are never pretty, but this one may be especially charged, as the hot-eyed lady from Minnesota (and Tea Party Caucus founder) campaigns among her colleagues on the grounds that the new majority needs a genuine “constitutional conservative” in its top ranks—an argument containing the implicit suggestion that Boehner does not qualify as one.

There are few developments that would please me more than to see Bachmann get a leadership position in the Republican caucus. That wingnut would alienate more moderates than just about anyone else, whilst simultaneously throwing red meat to her extreme constituency.

the pressure on McConnell from his party’s anti-Establishment flank may in some ways be greater than that on Boehner—because of the presence of Jim DeMint. More than anyone, the junior senator from South Carolina is the animating spirit of the tea party. Having broken with long-standing tradition and encouraged primary challenges this year to sitting members of his own party, he has already made clear that he has no intention of backing away from his crusade for ideological purity.

How luck y can the Democrats get? Enforced ideological purity in the Republican party gives the President a chasm wide enough to drive the proverbial truck through the middle. Especially if the left insists on its own ideological purity.

In the likely event that a stalemate arises between the White House and Republicans over the budget, many tea-partyers are already champing at the bit for a government shutdown; but Boehner and McConnell, recalling how well that worked out for Gingrich and Dole, will be loath to let it happen.

Intra-party bickering; too bad we won't get to see it play out in all its gory glory.

In all of this, Obama will find opportunities to exploit. If he and his team handle it adroitly, they stand a chance of forcing the Republican leaders into a series of devil’s choices between, on the one hand, making compromises that exacerbate intra-party tensions and, on the other, satisfying the appetites of the ascendant wing of the GOP by coming across as ideological extremists to the vast American middle. The degree of adroitness required will be enormous, to be sure. Unlike Clinton, Obama will not be blessed with a foe as prone to massive overreach—and to indiscipline, messianism, and just plain silliness—as Gingrich was in 1995. The president will need to be clever, flexible, patient, and tough in roughly equal measure.

O, but he well might: the teabags will push the extreme, and will not be silent if denied. Can't wait to see the first firebrand speech Rand Paul makes.