“Shakespeare,” Steele grins, “has got nothing on this shit.”
THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN PRESIDENT OBAMA AND SPEAKER BOEHNER had the potential to alter the American trajectory for generations to come. There were obvious differences between them. During an early 2011 meeting on the White House patio, Boehner sipped red wine and puffed Camel Lights while Obama drank iced tea and chewed Nicorette gum. (Boehner says Obama, a former smoker, was “scared to death” of his wife and never bummed a cigarette.) But they actually had far more in common: Both men were self-made successes, hailing from humble roots and overcoming long odds to achieve their positions in government. Both carried themselves with a cool charisma that could prove disarming for their opponents. Above all, each believed he owned a certain stature in his party that would allow him to cut a deal with the other.
For all the anti-Obama panic that animated the GOP in 2009 and 2010, Boehner had pushed a more substantive message—“Where are the jobs?”—that revealed a traditional sensibility of how to oppose a president. Boehner wanted, of course, to see Obama defeated in 2012. But he wasn’t much for stunts. His mission as the Speaker was to make practical policy gains while demonstrating to the country that Republicans could be trusted as a competent party. Meanwhile, from the White House’s perspective, there was a qualitative difference in the way Boehner interacted with Obama compared to the attitudes of McConnell, Eric Cantor, and others.
“When I saw that Boehner was becoming Speaker, I thought that was a positive thing,” recalls Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden. “I thought there could be actually some work together, some collaboration together, and we could actually get some things done. But I thought, most of all, he was going to treat the president with more respect than some of his colleagues had.”
Treating Obama with respect was part of Boehner’s problem. Republicans around the country had little regard for the president. Many felt he looked down his nose at their way of life. Some thought he was a serial liar. And more than a few believed he was illegitimate—that he hadn’t been born in America and thus wasn’t qualified to be president.
Numerous state governments debated newly urgent legislation in 2009 and 2010 requiring presidential candidates to release long-form birth certificates. This paranoia echoed beyond the provinces: Twelve House Republicans cosponsored a similar bill in Congress, lending a higher degree of legitimacy to the conspiracy theorizing. When one of the cosponsors, Texas congressman Louie Gohmert, urged Cantor in a meeting to bring up the bill for a vote, he made his point with the subtlety of a sledgehammer: “Kenya hear me? Kenya hear me?”
“Louie Gohmert is insane. There’s not a functional brain in there,” Boehner says, muttering a few expletives for good measure. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
But Gohmert wasn’t an outlier. “I knew people, smart people, who were into it,” says Karl Rove. “They thought it was this vast conspiracy, that people took this kid who was born in Kenya and faked newspaper clippings from the time of his birth, and documents in the Hawaii state government files, so this Kenyan-born kid could pass for an American citizen and wind up running for president. This was the Manchurian candidate on steroids—not just on steroids. This was the Manchurian candidate on LSD and peyote.”
“I dealt with it every day. Every. Single. Day,” Boehner says. “I went on TV and said, ‘Hawaii released the birth certificate; that’s good enough for me.’ I got my ass chewed out for weeks. You would have thought I was Satan himself.”
He adds, “There was at least a couple dozen members who believed it. These are members of Congress, but they aren’t in this world by themselves. Once upon a time, they would have belonged to the fringe. They weren’t the fringe anymore.”
“It wasn’t just in the conference. It was at home,” says Cantor. “I mean, we would encounter groups of people who absolutely took that to be the truth: [Obama] was not an American, he was a Muslim. . . . There was this rumor mongering, and frankly, I think, a racist play for votes.”
Polling throughout Obama’s presidency would reveal large numbers of Republican voters harboring stubborn doubts about his citizenship: 41 percent in a 2010 CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey; 43 percent in 2011, per Gallup; 61 percent in 2015, according to Public Policy Polling; and 72 percent in 2016, as found in an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll.
Birtherism aside, the reality was that Republicans simply did not like Obama, and for many of them, civility was synonymous with surrender. Boehner learned this the hard way. When he and the president played a round of golf together in June 2011, along with Biden and Ohio governor John Kasich, the blowback was so furious from conservatives—on talk radio, in Boehner’s district, even in Congress—that he knew immediately it could never happen again.
“There were actually people who came in, Republican leaders of committees who would sit and say, ‘Mr. President, my being here is an act of courage. Do you realize how much damage it does to me to sit with you?’” Biden recalls. His voice pinches with anger. “Can you imagine saying that to a president? Well, that was said. That was said by more than two people I can name. And so, John got ripped for doing what the Congress and the president are supposed to do, which is actually see if they can collaborate for the public good. But as the Republican Party became more and more radicalized in the House, John was getting the living devil beaten out of him.”
Indeed, this was a strange new world for the Speaker. Boehner had played his share of hardball politics as a lieutenant to Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, an era of vicious political tribalism in its own right. But he had also watched Gingrich strike significant deals with his nemesis, President Bill Clinton. So, when signs mounted in 2011 of a conservative rebellion fermenting inside his conference, Boehner was dismissive. He knew what these hard-charging freshmen wanted, because he’d been in their shoes.
This was a costly misreading of his members. Much had changed since Boehner came to Congress in 1990—the inception of Fox News, the proliferation of super PACs, the decline of trust in government and institutions, the election of a black president—and the Republican Party had evolved accordingly. By the time Boehner came to terms with this transformation, it was too late.
“He thought of himself as someone who was of the Tea Party mentality before the Tea Party was a thing,” says Anne Bradbury, who served as Boehner’s floor director, one of the top staff positions in Congress. “So, I think there were some assumptions made that he got these people, and that they would see he was one of them. But that really never came together.”
OBAMA TRIED TO PUT AN END TO THE INSANITY ON APRIL 27, 2011.
Without advance notice, the White House posted a long-form version of the president’s birth certificate online. Suspicion of Obama’s citizenship had percolated on the outskirts of the internet since 2008, when his campaign released a copy of the standard “certification of live birth” issued by Hawaii. Imaginations ran wild on the right for the next three years. A new breed of desperado, emboldened by the digital age, took to the internet spreading varying claims of the document’s fraudulence. No amount of testimony otherwise—from government officials, genealogical researchers, even conservative pundits—could kill the conspiracy theory. Only by releasing his long-form certificate, the doubters said, could Obama prove himself legitimate.