John Boehner, underestimated genius

I don't know what Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi are going to do. They've surprised me time and again—for better and worse.

But John Boehner? I'm the Michael Jordan and Yo-Yo Ma and Bill Gates of Boehner predictions. If there was a Nobel Prize for Boehner prediction, I'd win it. If there were championship rings for Boehner prediction, I'd have ten.

So it's interesting to see Dan Pfeiffer commenting publicly on what I told my boss for years:

I’ve always believed that the fundamental, driving strategic ethos of the Republican House leadership has been, What do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at?

We should never assume they have a long game. We used to spend a lot of time thinking that maybe Boehner is saying this to get himself some more room. And it’s like, no, that’s not actually the case. Usually he’s just saying it because he just said it or it’s the easiest thing to solve his immediate problem.

The difference between Pfeiffer, and the conservatives who agree with Pfeiffer, and me is that I'm willing to see this as a sign of Boehner's leadership genius. His hardliners are like gunmen threatening to shoot the hostages unless they're given a trillion dollars. Of course he's going to promise them a trillion dollars if they just put down their guns. It doesn't matter that he knows he can't pay them, or that their demands are absurd in the first place. The important thing is to get past the current crisis, whatever it is, with the hostages mostly alive.

And the amazing thing is that he's been able to do this over and over and over again. (Which suggests to me that either his gunmen have the memory spans of gerbils or enough of them want to be fooled. Or both.) He's been able to do this even when some of the "young guns" nipping at his heels have fallen by the wayside.

Nancy Pelosi ruled from strength and presided over the four most productive years since the 1960s, working with both a Republican president and a Democratic one. But her members were fundamentally less like delusional gunmen and more like boring old legislators with their egos and their parochial constituent concerns and their petty rivalries ripe for exploitation. She also had access to the traditional tools of leadership: earmarks, DCCC money, plum committee posts on committees that were actually working on viable legislation, and so on.

John Boehner's accomplishments are no less significant: he has said and done whatever it takes to keep his conference from so thoroughly destroying the Republican brand as to be unelectable for a generation. Time after time after time he has prevented his hardliners from killing the hostages. (By the way, we're the hostages.) 

And he has done so without many of the traditional tools of leadership. We've had eras of strong chairmen, eras of strong speakers, and we are now in an anarchistic era of strong backbenchers, thanks to a confluence of factors such as the rise of super PACs that allow bomb-throwers to bypass party funding and outside groups so strong that Jim Demint retired from his Senate seat mid-term to become the president of one them. He proudly notes he has more power there than he ever had in the Senate.

So I don't blame Boehner for not having a long term plan. Every time he has made a savvy strategic decision to move legislation to the right (but still to the left of the utter annihilation his conference demands), his right flank has rebelled. In 2011, he won major concessions from a Democratic president on a "grand bargain," securing deep entitlement cuts for a paltry increase in taxes. But the gunmen balked at raising any taxes at all, refused to back him, and the final deal—though devastating to a host of Democratic priorities such as education—was $2 trillion smaller and included almost no cuts to entitlement spending. The same pattern was repeated in 2012 during the fiscal cliff negotiations when he had to yank his Plan B from the floor, in the lead up to the 2013 shutdown, and so on.

No amount of strateegery is going to change the fact that his chamber includes 30-40 members who sincerely believe there's a path to total victory in divided government if they are only true enough to their convictions, and who will thus settle for nothing less than everything. No nominal "leader," once he is tarnished by the demands of reality, is going to be able to truly lead this group.

Back in June, Thomas Franks wrote a timeless piece about the inevitability of conservatives turning on their leaders:

The clash of idealism and sellout are how conservatives always perceive their movement, and what happened to Eric Cantor is a slightly more spectacular version of what often happens to GOP brass. That right-wing leaders are seduced by Washington D.C., and that they will inevitably betray the market-minded rank-and-file, are fixed ideas in the Republican mind, certainties as definite as are its convictions that tax cuts will cure any economic problem and that liberals are soft on whoever the national enemy happens to be.

And so the movement advances along its rightward course not directly but by a looping cycle of sincerity and sellout in which the radicals of yesterday always turn out to be the turncoats of today; off to the guillotine they are sent as some new and always more righteous generation rises up in their place. ...

So the cycle goes on, uprising after uprising, an eternal populist revolt against leaders who never produce and problems that never get solved. Somehow, the free-market utopia that all the primary voters believe in never arrives, no matter how many privatizations and tax cuts the Republicans try. And so they seek out someone even purer, someone even more fanatical.

Lesser political minds than Boehner's have fallen victim to the idea that they can be conservative enough to break this cycle and lead the unleadable. They have continued to scheme and plot and plan ahead, while John Boehner has surveyed the hostage-takers and come to the only sensible conclusion: "What do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at? [What is] the easiest thing to solve [my] immediate problem?"

While the right flank fumes and fusses, John Boehner knows that the hostages have only been modestly harmed, the Republican brand lives on, and next week's problem is next week's problem.