The potency of this combination, AstroTurf money and grassroots mobilizing, was realized on April 15, 2009. It was Tax Day, and the bill for eight years of big-government policies had finally come due. As if the bank bailouts, stimulus vote, and mortgage rescues weren’t unpopular enough, Obama was now throwing some $55 billion at the Detroit automakers (on top of the $25 billion in TARP funding Bush had provided) in exchange for government-mandated restructurings inside General Motors and Chrysler. Hundreds of Tea Party rallies were held nationwide in protest of Washington’s fiscal recklessness and its intrusion into the private marketplace.
It wasn’t just rage against Uncle Sam animating the masses. The news in March 2009 of New York financier Bernie Madoff having defrauded thousands of people out of tens of billions of dollars stoked the same feelings of exploitation and unfairness that were increasingly being directed at the government over its policies on spending, immigration, and trade. Decades of a widening chasm in incomes, a diminishment of factory work, a shredded national identity, a dissipating sense of societal cohesiveness, a vanished sense of postwar unity—it was all blurring together in an abstract expression of outrage.
America was in open revolt, and Obama’s honeymoon period was suddenly over.
The cover of Time magazine for May 18, 2009, showed a Republican elephant logo with the headline “Endangered Species.” It didn’t come across as hyperbole—not when party honchos had spent the past six months thinking the same thing, and certainly not when Arlen Specter, the senator from Pennsylvania, felt compelled to defect to the Democratic Party that spring, giving Obama a 60th vote in the Senate once Al Franken was seated after a protracted legal fight in Minnesota.
But all the while, something was happening—an authentic rebellion the likes of which the right hadn’t seen since the days of the John Birch Society. The irony was subtle but significant: Republicans had failed for the past four years to mobilize their base, yet Obama had done for the party what it could not do for itself.
GOP LEADERS WERE KEEN TO CAPITALIZE. BOEHNER WAS SCHEDULED to be in Bakersfield, California, on April 15, headlining a fund-raiser in the district of Cantor’s chief deputy whip, Kevin McCarthy. Boehner and McCarthy agreed to attend the Bakersfield Tea Party event on the condition that they not give any remarks. Boehner suspected with some justification that these crowds would be just as hostile to Republican politicians, especially leadership officials, as they were to Democrats.
“We’re at this event, and there’s some people who are really happy that we showed up,” Boehner recalls. “But there were others that just looked at us with more disdain than you could ever imagine. They thought we were the enemy.”
If anything, strange as it would seem given the events of the next several years, Boehner embodied the Tea Party before it existed. A self-made businessman who worked as a janitor to put himself through school, Boehner had earned a small fortune selling corrugated boxes and injection-molded plastics before turning his attention to politics. After winning a state legislative race, he defied the Ohio GOP establishment to win a congressional seat in 1990, overcoming a last name that was mispronounced by everyone, from talk radio hosts to a young volunteer for his campaign, a local college Republican named Paul Ryan. “I didn’t know him,” Ryan laughs. “I thought his name was Boner.”
Boehner (“BAY-ner”) quickly cut a reputation as a crusader against waste and corruption. Leading a group of young lawmakers known as the “Gang of Seven,” he gained fame for investigations into the House Bank and the House Post Office that rattled Congress to its core. These triumphs earned him a spot at Gingrich’s leadership table following the GOP Revolution of 1994, but he was later exiled to the rank and file. Clawing his way back to congressional relevance over the ensuing decade, Boehner sharpened his legislative skills, won a committee chairmanship, authored the No Child Left Behind Act, and forged alliances with members across the aisle—and across his party’s ideological divide. By the time Denny Hastert had vacated his spot atop the House GOP, Boehner was positioned as the undisputed heir apparent.
He was a breathing paradox: the creature of K Street who rented his Capitol Hill apartment from a lobbyist, but who never requested an earmark in his career; the chain-smoking bullshitter who wept at the mere mention of schoolchildren; the midwestern Everyman who never left home without a clean shave and an ironed shirt; the bartender’s son who grew up in a two-room ranch with his parents and eleven siblings only to become the Speaker of the House.
If Cantor served as the House GOP’s head—calculating the angles, crunching the votes—Boehner was its heart. Having evolved from insurgent to institutionalist, he specialized in reading people, in building relationships, in giving tough love and getting respect in return. He trafficked in candor and humor, often at the same time, never hesitant to tell someone what they didn’t want to hear or dispense pearls of wisecracking wisdom. Once, when Patrick McHenry was brand new to Congress, Boehner spotted him eating an ice-cream sandwich in the Republican cloakroom. “Don’t do that,” Boehner told the freshman, pointing to the frozen snack.
“Why?” McHenry asked.
“You’re gonna be a fat-ass,” Boehner replied. (Sure enough, McHenry says, his weight ballooned during his first term in Washington.)
Another time, after he had finished railing against Alaska-based earmarks on the floor, Boehner was confronted by the state’s congressman, Don Young, who after a verbal skirmish shoved Boehner against a wall and held a ten-inch blade to his throat. “Fuck you,” Boehner said, staring the Alaskan in the eye. Young would later ask Boehner to serve as best man at his wedding.
This political sixth sense, however, did nothing for Boehner when it came to the Tea Party. He understood the recoil against a growing federal government, but he wasn’t sure what to make of grown men wearing tricornered hats. He agreed that Washington spent taxpayer money carelessly, but he wasn’t convinced this movement was really about fiscal responsibility.
Boehner wasn’t alone in this regard. The tea in Tea Party was an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already,” yet the more time Republicans spent observing the nascent movement, the less certain they felt about its organizing philosophy.
“In theory, it was all about spending,” Cantor says. “In theory. But I began to question that.”
“The Kochs didn’t like the social issues, so they tried to make it a small-government thing and put ‘values’ on the back burner,” says Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “But if you actually looked at the survey data, the Tea Party were our people—and the cultural issues were the top priority for them. Moms raising their kids aren’t thinking about tax rates; they’re thinking about what kind of culture their kids are growing up in.”
“It was a populist movement, rooted in conservative limited-government principles,” recalls Jim Jordan, the Ohio congressman who would become Boehner’s archnemesis. “But part of it was a reaction to what many Americans viewed as Obama apologizing for America. . . . It was about more than spending, as evidenced by what happened with President Trump.”
“It was fiscal,” says Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator. “But it was also about lots of intrusion into our lives, control of your health care, and redefining marriage.” (Iowa on April 3 became the third state to legalize same-sex marriage, after Massachusetts and Connecticut, causing disorientation for those who had once taken solace in believing that such developments would be limited to coastal blue states.)