Boehner's Blue-Collar Roots Frame Possible Next U.S. House Speaker's Views
U.S. House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner
Alex Wong/Getty Images
U.S. House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner.
U.S. House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner. Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images
John Boehner -- the Ohio congressman poised to be speaker if Republicans capture the U.S. House in the Nov. 2 elections -- pumped gas, mopped floors and tended his family’s bar to pull himself up from blue-collar roots to success in business and politics.
“I’ve had every rotten job there ever was” and “was grateful to have every single one,” the House Republican leader told supporters at a rally this month in West Chester, near his home about 25 miles north of Cincinnati.
Boehner, 60, the second of 12 children in a family of Roman Catholic Democrats, put himself through college in seven years and became a millionaire businessman. He uses his life story to urge voters to stop President Barack Obama’s “job-killing agenda” by electing Republicans, who he says will cut federal spending, extend tax cuts, repeal the Democrats’ health-care law and create a more business-friendly environment.
“Whether you push a mop, run a backhoe, lay shingles, tend bar,” Americans “take pride in our work,” Boehner said at the West Chester rally. The midterm elections are about “one issue, jobs,” that were “promised by the current administration but never delivered,” he said.
The values of hard work and self-reliance are the source of Boehner’s political philosophy of getting government out of the way of entrepreneurs. He says his experience in running a small business shaped his view that politicians have “no understanding of the private sector.”
Still Unknown
Boehner has worked largely behind the scenes with a tactical sense for organizing the House Republican caucus; only in the past year has he become a more publicly visible leader. Many Americans haven’t formed an opinion of him, a Bloomberg poll this month showed.
He was first elected to Congress, representing southwestern Ohio’s 8th District, in 1990 and was named majority leader in 2006. After Democrats took control of the House in that year’s elections, he became minority leader.
Democrats say that even though Boehner comes from humble roots, as a congressman he has become a protector of wealthy interests and is cozy with business lobbyists. They cite his opposition to a proposal to require corporations, unions and trade associations to disclose their political contributions and donors for such spending.
Boehner is “the guy that was huddling with all the lobbyists from Wall Street” to try to defeat the financial regulatory overhaul enacted this year, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told reporters at an Oct. 21 breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. Van Hollen is chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Humble Beginnings
Boehner grew up in a two-bedroom house in Reading, a town near Cincinnati. Until they added more rooms to their home, his parents, Earl and Mary Ann, slept on a pull-out couch. A few miles away is Andy’s Café, the family-owned tavern in Carthage.
Boehner and his older brother, Bob, started sorting bottles in the tavern when they were 8 or 9 years old. Soon they were “mopping the floors, washing the windows on Saturday,” the lawmaker’s brother said.
“Our parents taught us to work hard to be successful,” Bob Boehner said. “That’s what he has done all his life.”
Boehner played football at all-boys Archbishop Moeller High School under Gerry Faust, later the head coach at the University of Notre Dame. Faust “showed you how to dedicate yourself to something you believed in,” said teammate Jerry Vanden Eynden.
‘Team Player’
Faust said in an interview that he remembers Boehner as a “team player” who “didn’t care who got the credit.” As House Republican leader, Boehner operates “more in a team concept than a captain concept,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the party’s chief deputy whip.
Visits to the homes of more prosperous classmates led Boehner to decide that “if I work hard and do it right, I can have my own bedroom and my own country club membership,” said Richard Slagle, former chief lobbyist for AK Steel Holding Corp. who helped launch the lawmaker’s political career.
To put himself through Xavier University in Cincinnati, Boehner held a series of jobs. “That’s what he had to do, because our parents didn’t have extra money,” said Boehner’s sister Linda Meineke, 51, the daytime bartender at Andy’s for 21 years, who now lives in the family home.
She said Boehner inherited his father’s gregarious nature and his mother’s sharp tongue.
“My dad got along great with everybody” because of “how he spoke to people, not the words he used,” Meineke said. Mrs. Boehner “pretty much spoke her mind; John has that, too,” she said.
Night Janitor
Boehner met his wife, Debbie, at Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., now part of Sanofi-Aventis SA. He worked at the drug manufacturer during college, starting as a night janitor, and she was a secretary. They were married in 1973 and have two grown daughters, Tricia and Lindsay.
After he graduated from Xavier with a business degree, Boehner joined Nucite Sales, which sold packaging material to Ohio manufacturers, eventually becoming its president and purchasing the company. Boehner’s 2010 congressional financial disclosure valued his holdings at as much as $6.6 million.
His “experience with the small businessman’s problems” put him on a mission to “get government out of business” when he was elected a state legislator in 1984, said Adam Cristo Sr., a retired homebuilder and longtime supporter.
Safe Seat
Boehner’s congressional seat is considered so safe that his Democratic challenger this year, Justin Coussoule, said he couldn’t even get a meeting with Democratic strategists in Washington to seek financial help from the party. In 2008 Boehner was re-elected with 68 percent of the district’s vote, outpolling Republican presidential nominee John McCain of Arizona, who took 61 percent.
When he isn’t in Washington or traveling to raise money for Republican candidates, Boehner lives near a golf course in Wetherington, a gated residential community and country club in West Chester.
Coussoule calls Boehner’s residence a metaphor for his transformation from a working-class kid to a political power- broker who hobnobs with corporate lobbyists on golf courses.
“He couldn’t be more out of touch with the real people that live here,” Coussoule said.
Boehner plays golf with lobbyists and other potential donors at places like the Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples, Florida, where his Freedom Project political action committee held two golf-related fundraisers in the last two years.
Frequent Travel
When Congress isn’t meeting, Boehner travels to raise money -- more than $42 million at 150 political events this year, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
This leaves little time to get home. Relatives and old friends say they see him infrequently.
Jerry Boehner, 45, who helps manage his father-in-law’s grocery and catering business in Reading, says he sees his older brother three or four times a year at political events.
“Usually I get about a five-minute window,” Boehner said in an interview in his office behind the store. “You got all this stuff racing through your head you want to say to him,” he said. “You need some time to get it out, sometimes you don’t.”
Debbie Boehner, who sells real estate in West Chester, said she seldom travels on the campaign trail with her husband.
“He does his thing and I kind of do mine,” she said after the rally in West Chester. “He’s so busy” working for candidates “to try to get back in the majority.”
If polls are correct, Republicans will gain more than the 39 net seats they need to take control of the House.
‘Contract With America’
In 1994, Boehner was an architect of his party’s “Contract With America” legislative agenda that helped the Republicans win control of the House in that year’s elections. Boehner became chairman of the House Republican Conference under Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia.
The next year, he drew complaints from colleagues for handing out contribution checks to members on the House floor from lobbyists for Brown & Williamson Tobacco. “It’s not a violation of House rules” yet “it’s a bad practice,” Boehner said in an interview for a documentary aired on the Public Broadcasting Service.
He was exiled from the leadership after being on the fringe of a failed 1997 plot to remove Gingrich as speaker. Boehner focused on legislation as a member of the House education committee and became the panel’s chairman.
When President George W. Bush pushed his “No Child Left Behind” education agenda, Boehner worked with the panel’s ranking Democrat, George Miller of California, and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts to craft bipartisan legislation. He cites this as an example of his willingness to work with the other party.
‘Flawed Bills’
Now, Boehner says he wants House committees to play a bigger role in writing legislation instead of turning out “flawed bills” that wind up being rewritten by legislative leaders.
Lawmakers should be allowed to offer more amendments on the floor, he said in a Sept. 30 speech in Washington. “Guess what?” he said. “You’re going to have more engaged legislators from both sides of the aisle.”
New Jersey Democrat Robert Andrews said that times have changed since Boehner was a “very inclusive” education committee chairman. Boehner’s political “base won’t permit him to do that now,” Andrews said.
Andrews also expressed skepticism that Boehner would carry out a more open legislating process when he rules out tax increases even for the highest-income Americans. “That’s not legislating,” Andrews said.
Health-Care Law
A Republican House majority would “do everything” to keep the health-care overhaul from going into effect, including refusing to pay for new federal employees to implement it, Boehner said Sept. 30.
The Republicans’ “Pledge to America” legislative agenda promises to cut $100 billion in federal spending next year, though it doesn’t say where the reductions would be made. It also calls for permanently extending the income tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 that are set to expire at year’s end.
In a Sept. 8 speech near Cleveland, Obama said Boehner offered “no new policies,” just proposals to “cut more taxes for millionaires and cut more rules for corporations.”
When pressed to explain why keeping the tax cuts won’t undermine deficit reduction, Boehner says a “healthy economy that gets Americans working again” would trim the shortfall.
“You can’t have a healthy economy if you raise taxes on those that you expect to reinvest in the economy and to hire more people,” he said Sept. 30.
Pro-Business Philosophy
Boehner’s pro-business philosophy is “what 60 to 70 percent of his district believes,” said Pete Dobrozsi, a former steel industry lobbyist who helped recruit Boehner to run for the Ohio legislature in 1984.
Even though Boehner’s political rhetoric is often sharply worded, “when he’s around a bunch of friends he gets pretty teary and emotional,” said Vanden Eynden, who stayed in Cincinnati and runs the Candle-Lite division of Lancaster Colony Corp., a Columbus-based manufacturing company. He marveled at how far his boyhood friend’s career has taken him.
“I don’t care what he says, it’s pretty glamorous,” Vanden Eynden said. “For the little guy coming from Reading” to “go to the places he’s been in the world, it’s pretty amazing.”
To contact the reporter on this story: James Rowley in Washington at jarowley@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva in Washington at msilva34@bloomberg.net.
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