http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-the-deano-chronicles-continued.html?ref=opinion&_r=0The Deano Chronicles, Continued
JAN. 10, 2015
Maureen Dowd
KISSING the sun. Swilling merlot. Plotting revenge.
Life is good for John Boehner.
Lying in a hammock at his new condo in Marco Island, Fla., the speaker of the House is even closing in on his goal of getting darker than the oxblood leather wingback chair in his Capitol office.
D.C.’s Dean Martin is relaxing, reviewing the tumultuous first week of the 114th Congress. There were the usual annoyances. The speaker told the press that he was comfortable in his skin even as his skin made the press uncomfortable. The Times’s First Draft did a Sherwin-Williams analysis of Boehner’s strikingly darker hue, syncing it to a color called “Husky Orange.”
And there were serious irritations, like another coup attempt by Tea Partiers eager to wreck the celebration of their party’s congressional takeover. This really bugs Boehner. How could a blue-collar Ohio pol who came to Congress in 1991 as a revolutionary be denounced as too establishment? How could critics dismiss him as “a squish?” How could he nearly be toppled from his speakership by a nobody named Ted Yoho?
Even in the flush of victory, the 65-year-old is hurt that some consider him a RINO, a fauxpublican who doesn’t have the brass to stand up to President Obama on immigration.
“That knuckle-dragger Hannity called me ‘cowardly,’ ” he mutters, lighting up another Ultra Light Camel. “I’m the most anti-establishment speaker we’ve ever had.” Hadn’t he always fought the good fight on earmarks? Hadn’t he always kept his regular-guy, son-of-a-Cincinnati-barkeep personality? Didn’t he still cut his own grass and eat breakfast at Pete’s Diner on the Hill?
As they had sat in his office, watching the dramatic vote count for speaker on C-Span, Boehner made his true feelings clear to his rat-pack pal, Saxby Chambliss: “Do these morons think they could do any better? Could Louie Gohmert really run the House better than me?
“I let Ted Yahoo make the response to Obama’s immigration order and he ran against me. Now I want him deported. And how about that Daniel Webster? At least the original tried to prevent civil war. I gave him a plum assignment on the Rules Committee and he ran against me. Then little Danny had the nerve to want his picture taken with me.
“If this were Chicago, those rat-finks would be in Lake Michigan. I did kick two of the quislings off the Rules Committee. My wife and my rat pack want vengeance. But I don’t do anger. I’m going to try to rise above it, and believe me, it’s not that hard to rise above guys like Gohmert and Yoho.
“We got the biggest majority since the Great Depression, but my pallie Mitch might be in for a shock. He’s been bragging that he’s going to get the Senate working again and move beyond the culture of ‘No’ that he created. I found out the hard way that you can’t get these knuckleheads to agree on anything except their right to be re-elected.”
His BlackBerry ring-a-ding dings, flashing a Florida area code.
“That better not be Webster or Yahoo,” he mutters. Listening, he grins. “Hey, Jeb,” he says warmly. “What’s up? I hope you didn’t take offense when I said I was anti-establishment.”
Pause. “Oh, you are, too?”
Boehner chuckles as the call ends, thinking an anti-establishment Bush is going to be an even tougher sell than an anti-establishment Boehner.
With everything else going on, he even had to come to the defense of Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, one of his top lieutenants, who spoke to a racist group back in 2002.
“I told those reporters that I knew, in his heart, Steve wasn’t a white supremacist,” Boehner says, laughing. “How could he be when he hangs out with somebody like me? Even President Obama called me a ‘person of color,’ hailing my orange as ‘the new black.’ ”
Thinking about Obama makes Boehner wince.
“So now President Harvard wants to give everybody free community-college educations? Should we do their homework for them, too? I had to work my way through school as a janitor.”
He wonders if the president saw Glenn Thrush’s piece in Politico revealing that, sometimes when Obama calls Boehner, the speaker puts the receiver on his desk, rolls his eyes and lights a Camel while the president drones on.
The speaker shrugs, rolls his eyes and lights a Camel. “The president keeps saying that he wants to work with us, but then he acts like his pal, the Cuban dictator,” he says. “He’s going to veto the Keystone pipeline. Executive orders have become par for the course. At least he’s par somewhere.
“Obama acts all liberated, but he’s just killing time. He was out of town all week and no one even noticed he was gone. Maybe I’ll retire with him. I don’t do legacy and I can’t bear the thought of going through another one of these battles for speaker with peabrains with slingshots.
“I can give speeches, get on boards and play Augusta National, just like all those other anti-establishment types.”
He refills his glass of red wine as his blue eyes fill with tears.
“It’s still just me, guys,” he sobs, “doing it my way.”
