ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Although I have never formally met outgoing House Speaker John A. Boehner — which is interesting in itself given that we travel in many of the same circles — I feel like I know him well. In fact, I have seen him many an early morning walking in Washington. As I leave Results gym on Capitol Hill at 6 a.m. after working out, I usually see the speaker walking with his security detail in the early morning darkness. Often, it is only the light of the telltale cigarette ember that announces his presence.
For the past several years, this has been our usual routine. I have often wondered whether the habit of smoking was how the speaker dealt with the stress of it all — both within and outside his party — trying to provide effective leadership for a fractured Congress and a divided nation.
In many ways, the job of the speaker of the House is much like that of a craftsman. He has to take the various planks — the needs of diverse constituencies under the majority party banner — and cut and shape them to erect a workable platform for governing. This has traditionally been a stable profession in Washington: Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democrat, served as speaker for 11 years until he retired in 1987.
But not so today. Many of the new members have come to the House with a mandate to burn down the barn, not to fix it. I can understand where such cynicism comes from. It comes from an American voting public that is fed up with the go along to get along nature of politics in Washington. They feel as if their demands — the very reason they elect representatives — get watered down and drowned out amid the horse-trading, backroom deal-making and backslapping of an entrenched Washington elite. They feel the only way they can be heard is to shake things up, to disrupt business as usual, even at the cost of stopping any business from getting done at all.
Speaker Boehner was once such a member. He came to the forefront as the leader of the opposition to Obamacare — refusing to even entertain President Obama when he came to Capitol Hill to try to sell the deal to Congress. He embraced the role of the obstructionist as the mantle of the minority — which was to counter the bully pulpit with a loud shout from the gallery. He rose to power on that basis — seen by many as the unifying voice of the outnumbered as the Democratic machine was set to steamroll through Washington.
But this model of leadership would come back to plague Mr. Boehner and the Republican establishment when they captured the majority in 2011. In what has become a textbook case of the tail wagging the dog, newly elected members from the tea party wing came in and immediately started shaking things up. They forced Congress to shut down the government rather than compromise with the president and Democrats in Congress. This move was largely seen as damaging to the Republican Party, and rather than enable the tea party to push through its agenda, has driven the country into a political impasse that continues to this day.
By the beginning of Mr. Obama’s second term, theatrical obstructionism has officially replaced constructive engagement as the congressional mantra. It’s one thing to stand in opposition as the minority party. But as the years passed, Mr. Boehner found himself at the helm of a deeply fractured majority. He was forced to expend considerably more effort corralling his own members than actually doing the business of government.
And this frustrated an already frustrated electorate to the point of near rebellion — as evidenced by the rise of the outsider in this year’s Republican presidential primary race.
But the fact remained that doing any deal with the White House — even a deal widely seen as a win for the GOP majority — would be seen in the eyes of many as a win for the president. In a purely partisan, zero-sum atmosphere, any win for Mr. Obama was seen as a loss for Congress rather than a win for the American people. Thus, in a sense, doing nothing became the de facto governing framework over which Mr. Boehner, through no fault of his own, found himself presiding.
For a person like the outgoing speaker, this state of affairs had to be endlessly boring and infinitely frustrating. He must have felt truly damned — not to the fiery damnation of those condemned to hell, but the more agonizing middle state of eternal purgatory.
To remain idle, taken to pacing the streets of the nation’s capital at the break of dawn, stuck, with nothing underfoot and nothing around but an impalpable grayness, intermittently punctuated by a single burning ember — that was Mr. Boehner’s unhappy lot.
In a parting shot at the “false prophets” in Congress, the outgoing speaker chided the Washington rabble to “do the right things for the right reasons.” After all, he said, “It’s easy to try and do the things you can’t do.” But governing effectively is really about “hav[ing] the courage to do the things you can do.”
• Armstrong Williams is sole owner/manager of Howard Stirk Holdings and executive editor of American CurrentSee online magazine.
• Armstrong Williams can be reached at 125939@example.com.
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