Tanned, Tested, Ready: John Boehner

You can tell a lot about a man from his tears, and House Speaker–to-be John Boehner has always been a weeper. He cried on the House floor while defending the Wall Street bailout and once choked up during a partisan speech accusing Democrats of abandoning the troops in Iraq. But he also used to bawl every year during the fundraisers he co-chaired with his friend Ted Kennedy for cash-strapped Catholic schools. “John’s got the biggest heart in the House,” says Republican conference boss Mike Pence, who lost a leadership election to Boehner in 2006. “My preacher used to say, ‘When the eyes leak, the head won’t swell.'”

On election night, after a wave of anti-Democratic anger assured Boehner the House Speaker’s gavel he has long craved, the 60-year-old former business owner from southwest Ohio managed to keep his composure for most of his unusually solemn victory speech. But when he got to the part about “economic freedom, individual liberty and personal responsibility,” about family and hard work, the blubbering began. “I hold these values dear because I’ve lived them,” Boehner whimpered. “I’ve spent my whole life chasing the American Dream.” As the tears flowed, he recounted how he started out mopping floors in his dad’s tavern, worked night shifts to pay for college and “poured my heart and soul” into a small plastics company. “And when I saw how out of touch Washington had become,” he continued, “I put my name forward and ran for office.”

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After two decades in Congress — and two stints in the Republican leadership — Boehner is an unlikely crusader against the ways and means of Washington. For months Democrats lampooned him as a golf-addicted, lobbyist-encircled, chain-smoking Beltway insider with a weird orange tan and a radical right-wing agenda, the physical and political embodiment of everything Americans mistrusted about Republicans during the past two election cycles.

But the tears reflect a side of Boehner that defies the country-club caricatures: a self-made businessman with working-class roots who obviously cares about more than his golf game, an amiable consensus builder who learned his people skills growing up with 11 siblings and one bathroom. The new Speaker, his allies say, is a levelheaded grownup, a pragmatic conservative with a sensitive side, a power broker but not a power addict, an unabashed institutionalist who has pledged to respect the rights of the minority, reduce the Speaker’s authority to micromanage legislation and bring real democracy to the House. He’s never requested an earmark, and members of both parties agree that he keeps his word. “That’s what’s missing today — you can agree to disagree honorably and civilly,” says National Federation of Independent Business president Dan Danner, a longtime friend of Boehner’s from Ohio. “John’s pretty good at that.”

All About Winning
That said, the caricatures didn’t materialize from nowhere. Many of Boehner’s closest personal and political friends really are lobbyists for banks, insurers and other corporations. Ever since he first joined the House leadership 15 years ago, he has been a leading Republican ambassador to K Street. He was a staunch supporter of just about everything President George W. Bush did and an equally staunch opponent of just about everything President Obama has done. His emotional rant against the Obama health care bill — “Hell, no, you can’t!” — has become a YouTube classic. He’s all about winning; the day before the election, Boehner campaigned with an Ohio Republican long shot who had admitted he used to dress up like a Nazi for World War II re-enactments.

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His political opponents have no doubts about how to characterize him. House Committee on Education and Labor chairman George Miller says it’s bizarre to describe him as anything but “a very hard-nosed Republican partisan,” even though Boehner worked closely with Kennedy and President Bush on the No Child Left Behind education reforms in 2001. “That was long, long ago, in a universe far, far away,” Miller says. “A universe that doesn’t exist anymore.” He has clearer memories of Boehner bottling up issues like the minimum wage, mine safety and nutritious school lunches. “People are grasping for flecks of bipartisanship, but that’s not what John’s about.”

Now America will find out exactly what Boehner’s about. As a lieutenant to former Speaker Newt Gingrich, Boehner watched the last Republican revolution unravel from within, and he has been asking current GOP wise men for advice on avoiding Gingrich’s mistakes. The oddly understated tone of Boehner’s election-night speech — he twice declared that “this is not a time for celebration” — was no accident; he is desperate to avoid the overreaching bombast and look-at-me hubris that he associates with the Gingrich era. His speech focused on his desire to listen to and do the bidding of the American people, not his big ideas or big plans. He tried to position himself as the adult in the room.

At the same time, Boehner is keenly aware that the GOP’s Tea Party wing is suspicious of him as a go-along-to-get-along Establishment type. He has tried to signal to the insurgents that he considers himself one of them, appearing at their rallies, echoing their rhetoric, tempering his platitudes about trying to work with the President with red meat about the “failed Obama-Pelosi agenda.” “This is not a time for compromise,” Boehner said Oct. 27 on Sean Hannity’s radio show, “and I can tell you that we will not compromise on our principles.”

Boehner declined to speak with TIME for this story; before the election, he didn’t want to say anything too extreme that could energize liberals or too milquetoast that would alienate conservatives. And he still doesn’t want to get pinned down on specifics beyond his support for a familiar Republican agenda of massive tax cuts and mostly unspecified spending cuts that would somehow reduce the deficit without affecting seniors, the troops or any popular government programs. The last time he tried to get specific, Boehner conceded on TV that he’d vote for Obama’s plan to extend the Bush tax cuts aimed at the middle class if that were his only option, then had to backpedal to reassure conservatives he preferred to extend all the Bush tax cuts right up the income ladder. Most of those conservatives wished he’d just kept his mouth shut. And mostly, that’s what he’s doing — for now.

Meet Your Speaker
It’s not as if John Andrew Boehner is a mysterious figure on Capitol Hill. He is what he is: a business-friendly conservative with a genuine aversion to taxes, regulations and earmarks; a pinstriped fundraising machine who once distributed campaign checks from a tobacco company on the House floor; a loyal Republican whose occasional drifts from the party line (on issues such as immigration and China) have tended to match those of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He’s a patient leader who doesn’t often pop off like Gingrich or bang heads like Tom DeLay; he’s an even-keeled process guy who rhapsodizes about his love for the “people’s House.” None of that means he’s a centrist or a moderate. “I have one of the most conservative voting records in the House,” he told TIME at the start of this Congress. “But I don’t wear it on my sleeve. I don’t shove it in people’s faces.”

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Boehner’s staff complains about the “GTL” cartoon of Boehner — golf, tan and lobbyists, a Washington-insider version of Jersey Shore’s gym, tan and laundry. But it’s not just Boehner’s enemies who compare him to Dean Martin or Mad Men‘s Don Draper — he can’t even sit in a congressional hearing for an hour without ducking out to puff his Camel Lights 100s. He drinks his share of Merlot and hangs out with a crowd of influence peddlers in what’s known as Boehnerland. He’s a frequent flyer on corporate jets and successfully fought a ban on privately funded congressional travel in the 2007 ethics-reform bill. This election cycle alone, special interests have paid for him to take 40 trips worth $158,000. Just hours before his victory speech, he held court at his favorite Washington restaurant, Trattoria Alberto, with his 40 closest friends and advisers, the bulk of whom are corporate lobbyists. He’s often mocked around the Hill as a dandy. His friends razz him for fastidiously washing and ironing his own shirts; he’s always been fond of cologne, and he can’t resist making fun of just about anyone with a bad haircut or a too-short tie. And yes, he loves golf. He has said that’s how he acquired his otherworldly tan. But Boehner is often underestimated. He may prefer the Weather Channel to Fox News, but he’s still a fierce partisan who united every House Republican against Obama’s stimulus and health care plans and all but three of them against Wall Street reform.

There’s nothing mysterious about Boehner’s plans as Speaker either. The GOP’s new Pledge to America — crafted by Brian Wild, a former lobbyist for ExxonMobil and AIG who recently joined Boehner’s staff — is vague but blunt: more tax cuts, less regulation, more drilling, less spending in the abstract and a rollback of just about everything Obama has done. After a recent speech, when a TIME reporter pressed him about how he could solve the nation’s debt crisis while slashing taxes and not touching entitlements or the military, he fell back on generalities about controlling spending and getting Americans working again. His staff says one of his first orders of business as Speaker will be a bill proposing $100 billion in unspecified cuts, but he was much more revealing during the rollout of the Pledge: “The point we make in this preamble,” he said, “is that we are not going to be any different from what we’ve been.”

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It’s an odd message for an angry electorate, but it rings true. Boehner isn’t any different from what he’s been since he arrived in Congress 20 years ago.

Self-Made Survivor
Boehner may fit the profile of a country-club Republican, but he grew up in a blue collar Democratic family in Reading, Ohio, near Cincinnati. His dad owned a bar, and his mom worked in a cafeteria before she started having children. John was the second of 12, and he and his older brother Bob were in charge of making sure all the chores got done. “You learn to compromise in a family that big,” recalls Bob, who lost his job as a Reading city official in February. “And John got pretty good at talking people into doing things.” Boehner’s friend Jerry Vanden Eynden, now the president of a Cincinnati candle company, remembers those days a bit differently: “John would bark out the orders — and then we’d leave!”

But Boehner always had to work. He waited tables and tended bar at his dad’s tavern, known as Andy’s Café, an experience he’s credited with preparing him to lead a caucus. He woke up at 3 a.m. to deliver Sunday papers, always taking a break for 6 a.m. Mass. He drove bulldozers and worked roofing jobs, even though he was afraid of heights. He did get a break during football season. His high school coach, Gerry Faust, remembers him as a serviceable linebacker and long snapper who once played in a big game despite back spasms. “I said, ‘John, you’re in no shape to play.’ He said, ‘Coach, I’ll get it done,'” says Faust, who later coached Notre Dame. “Hard worker, team player.”

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Back then, nobody dreamed that Boehner would end up where he is. Asked whether Boehner was a team leader, Faust replied, “He was one of 38 seniors. They were all leaders.” He was not an exceptional student and took a job as a janitor after high school. His brother Bob says Boehner might have skipped college if he hadn’t started dating the woman who was to become his wife: “He needed an education if he was going to get anywhere with Debbie.” (They’re still married and have two adult daughters.) He took night classes at Xavier University in Cincinnati for seven years, finally graduating in 1977. He then landed a sales job at a small plastics firm and worked his way up to president and part owner of the company, becoming a self-made millionaire. “He was an aggressive salesman, and he really knew how to take care of his customers,” Vanden Eynden says.

Boehner’s business experience pushed him into the GOP — he felt overregulated and overtaxed — and into politics, first as the head of his homeowners’ association, then a township trustee, then a state representative and finally a Congressman in 1990. He quickly made his name on the Hill as a young reformer, leading the Gang of Seven that helped elevate the previously obscure House bank — and the members whose overdrafts made it a scandal — into a powerful metaphor for the congressional entitlement mentality. He became a trusted Gingrich deputy, a leading spokesman for the Contract with America that helped the GOP take back the House in 1994. He was elected conference chairman and began convening a weekly strategy session with sympathetic business lobbyists known as the Thursday Group.

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If Gingrich was the rabble-rousing bomb thrower behind that Republican revolution, Boehner was the steady hand trying to keep it on track. He focused on the politics of the possible. Even though he had always yearned to abolish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which he considered a red-tape monstrosity, he urged firebrands in the conference to push less dramatic but more achievable reforms. Nevertheless, after Gingrich’s excesses cost him his job as Speaker in 1998, Boehner was ousted from the leadership as well and exiled to the chairmanship of Education and Workforce. Upon learning the news, Boehner went back to his offices and calmly told his staff, “We’ll survive.”

He didn’t sulk. He legislated. The new GOP leadership tried to stop his bipartisan outreach on No Child Left Behind, but Bush took his side, and the deal got done. So did pension reform, even though Boehner took some flak for trying to slip in a perk for hedge funds. “John had the opportunity to fold his tent, take his ball and go home,” says Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, one of his closest friends. “Or he could lick his wounds and live to fight another day.”

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After DeLay, in his own flameout, went down as majority leader, Boehner defeated his successor, Roy Blunt, in 2006. As odd as it sounds, Boehner was considered a fresher face. “One leader after another fell by the wayside,” Chambliss says. “John continued to move in a positive direction.” As minority leader, he struggled to keep his conference united behind President Bush, especially on hot-button issues like the bank bailout. But ever since Obama provided a foil, Republicans have fallen in line. And now Boehner has landed the job of his dreams. The sole portrait in his first Capitol office was not of President Reagan but of former Speaker Nicholas Longworth of Ohio. He often strategized about winning the Speakership with his close friend and chief of staff, Detroit native Paula Nowakowski, who died suddenly in January. At Trattoria Alberto Tuesday night, much of Boehnerland sported Detroit Red Wings lapel pins in her honor.

The Coming Collision
So what sort of Speaker will he be? How will he leave his mark on the House? If there’s one issue that illustrates Boehner’s personal beliefs and leadership style, it’s earmarks, the pet projects that members of Congress slip into spending bills. Boehner has personally taken a principled stand against pork. He has never requested an earmark for his district, telling his constituents that if they’re looking to raid the Treasury, they should elect someone else. But in 2006, when Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona was crusading against earmarks, Boehner pressured him to stop embarrassing fellow Republicans and booted him off the Judiciary Committee when he refused to do so. So Flake had to chuckle this year when Boehner sent a letter to Republicans warning that they would lose committee assignments if they requested earmarks. The political winds had shifted. “It’s easy to find religion in the minority,” Flake says. “We’ll see what happens if we win back the House.”

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Here’s a hint: the Pledge says nothing about earmarks.

In other words, Boehner is not the kind of leader who gets way in front of his caucus. He is more of a listener than an arm twister, but he does reward loyalty, and he has warned his conference that anyone voting for Democratic budgets — or more recently, against a move to embarrass the ethics-challenged Charlie Rangel — could lose committee assignments. He lets members say their piece but not endlessly. At one meeting with his lieutenants, Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina laid into him for failing to attack Democrats over some procedural shenanigans on the Rules Committee. Boehner finally interrupted: “When your opponents are committing suicide, Ginny, get out of their way.” He doesn’t backstab or hold grudges; he gets along with former rivals like Pence and Blunt. “He’s a member’s member,” says Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who was ousted from leadership by Boehner in 2008. “You can do business with John.”

That can be taken in more ways than one. For the other key to Boehner’s leadership style is money. This past summer, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a House Republican until 2001, said other Republicans described Boehner as a lazy leader who spent too much time in bars. But he’s a tireless fundraiser who headlined more than 160 campaign events this cycle alone, raking in $46 million for Republicans. He remembers whom he owes — and who owes him. When Representative Tim Murphy, who had not paid dues to the House GOP campaign committee, asked for his help on an energy issue, Boehner replied, “Why should I help you?” The next day, Murphy chipped in $30,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the House. When moderate Republican Joseph Cao voted against the stimulus, Boehner contributed $5,000 to his campaign the next day. In both cases, everyone involved says the timing of the contributions was coincidental, but House Republicans got the message. They know that Boehner’s annual cross-country bus trip — he covered 6,000 miles (9,700 km) this summer — tends to stop in the districts of the most loyal members.

(See 25 crazy moments from a crazy election campaign.)

To Democrats and many in the media, “tireless fundraiser” is just a nice way of saying “bagman for K Street.” Boehner received $32,000 from clients of corrupt GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He’s raked in $2.6 million from the financial sector. When he chaired the Education Committee, Sallie Mae gave him $122,500 — and his daughter a job. His lavish parties — an annual beach bash, golf tournaments in four states — are practically lobbyist conventions. But there’s never been evidence of a quid pro quo. The New York Times recently had to correct an otherwise unchallenged story about his close relationships with corporate lobbyists because it suggested one of them had “won” his vote against cap-and-trade and other Obama policies that Boehner clearly would have opposed anyway.

Boehner has said that as Speaker, one of his top priorities would be opening up the House and lowering its partisan temperature. Establishment Republicans are particularly irked by the Democratic attacks on Boehner, because by comparison with some Republicans on the Hill, they see him as the White House’s best hope for adult dialogue with the GOP next year. Boehner has had a civil relationship with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a close one with the Democrats’ more moderate majority leader Steny Hoyer. “He’s not an ideologue, and there will be a lot of pressure on him to do more than throw rocks,” Cole says.

But the pressure to throw rocks is about to become even more intense. It is an open secret in Washington that Boehner’s harder-edged deputy, Eric Cantor, a protégé of his longtime rival DeLay, has his eye on the Speaker’s job someday. Young Guns, Cantor’s new book co-written with fellow leadership colleagues Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, barely mentions Boehner. The lack of a compliment is returned with interest. “They are well qualified and ready to take my place … at the appropriate moment,” Boehner quipped at the young guns’ book release, swirling a glass of red wine. It was a good line, but that moment could come quickly if Boehner fails to keep the Tea Party fed. And it’s hard to see how Boehner could work closely with Obama when so much of the GOP base regards the President as a socialist usurper.

(Read “Waiting in the Wings: Cantor and Boehner.”)

Boehner has said he hopes to avoid a government shutdown. He was in the Republican leadership in 1995 when Gingrich forced the last one, and he remembers how it killed the GOP’s political momentum. But it’s not clear whether Boehner truly believes that a government shutdown would be a bad idea — or just that getting blamed for it would be. In any case, his conference is already committed to blocking or defunding health care reform and freezing the stimulus — inevitably setting it at odds with Obama — and its new members are likely to be even more confrontational. A collision is coming, and the question of whether Boehner truly wants it is almost irrelevant. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we repeated some of those lessons from 1995,” says Representative Steven LaTourette, a Boehner ally from Ohio.

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In 1995, after all, the resurgent Republicans sounded a lot like they do today, promising less spending and less government and denouncing the liberal overreach of the Democratic Party. If they go with Boehner’s preamble strategy — “We’re not going to be any different from what we’ve been” — it’s hard to see why the results should be any different from what they’ve been.

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