Obama versus Boehner

I would make a guess and say that Mr. Obama grew up wealthier than Mr. Boehner.  That BP and corporate interests have donated far more to Senator Obama and now President Obama than have contributed to Mr. Boehner.




John Boehner: the second of 12 kids from Ohio who is Barack Obama's elitist target




The White House is attempting to cling on to Democratic control of Washington by portraying an Ohio congressman who grew up in near poverty as an elitist country club Republican controlled by wealthy lobbyists.



By Toby Harnden, Reading, Ohio
17 Sep 2010
The Daily Telegraph



President Barack Obama is doing his best to turn Representative John Boehner, the House minority leader, into Public Enemy Number One. If Republicans win back the House of Representatives in November, as polls indicate, he will replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

In a recent speech, Mr Obama mentioned Mr Boehner by name nine times. A fundraising email sent out from BarackObama.com this week stated that corporate interests and lobbyists “have put all their chips on one man: Congressman John Boehner”.   [I think this says it all about Obama and the Democrats, but ... maybe not enough given their new lows each week.]

Democrats have started a BeatBoehner.com website that claims he spent $1 million on "luxury hotels, exclusive golf resorts and gourmet dining for himself and his fat-cat contributors". On the I-75 freeway outside Cincinnati, a huge poster showing a tanned Mr Boehner playing golf accuses him of teeing off 119 times in a year.

Yet Mr Boehner's life story is the type of classic up-by-the-bootstraps tale of the American Dream that can put a tear in a voter's eye. As his story becomes better known, the Democrats could even be drawing favourable attention upon him. Right now, most Americans have never heard of Mr Boehner, and fewer still can pronounce his name, which rhymes with Rayner. The alleged elitist country club Republican is an Ohio Congressman who grew up in near poverty.

His sister Lynda Meineke, who is 51, is a waitress and bar tender at Andy's Cafe in Carthage, Ohio, a family business that was founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938. As a child, one of Mr Boehner's jobs was to mop the floor.

Sitting outside the bar this week, sipping a bottle of Bud Light and smoking a cigarette, Mrs Meineke described her childhood as "cramped" but happy. "We learned how to share. If there was a toy, it wasn't just for you but for all the younger ones."

Mr Boehner, 61, is the second of 12 who grew up in a German-Irish family in Reading, Ohio, just outside Cincinnati. All but two of them still live within a few miles of each other. Two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.

The future Congressman started work as a janitor and took seven years to get his degree – the first in the family to do so – because he had several jobs to pay his way. He joined a plastics and packaging company, rising to president before entering local politics by being elected to the town board.

The family house on Hill Street initially had two bedrooms with Mr Boehner and three brothers sleeping in one, their sister in another and their parents on a pull-out bed in the living room. Their father Earl later built a three-bedroom extension.

Mrs Meineke, whose husband is an unemployed builder, still lives in the modest house. She remembers her father rising at dawn to go off to the café, which he ran with his twin brother and was a favourite with truck drivers.

"Then my mother would get up before all of us, and drink coffee and listen to the radio, packing our lunches and writing our names on all the brown bags.

"Then she'd start waking us up. You knew that if you didn't get up you'd be cutting your time in the bathroom in half. Sometimes, the boys had to go outside and pee by the tree."

Mr Boehner's deep tan is often mocked by Democrats. At a dinner last year, Mr Obama said: "He is a person of colour, although not a colour that appears in the natural world."

Like Mr Obama, Mr Boehner is a keen golfer and a smoker. His sister sniggered at the suggestion her brother might ever have been on a tanning bed. The "dark hair and olive skin", she said, came from her mother.

Bob Boehner, 62, the oldest of the 12, who sells real estate and is "looking for work", said: "We were conservative because we had to be. There wasn't the money to spend frivolously on things. We grew our own vegetables up on the hill. We learned early on that if you wanted something you had to go out and work for it."

His brother's childhood, he thinks, was good training for Congress, where, if he becomes Speaker, he will have 435 members to control. "He tried to make the younger ones do their homework and get the room cleaned up. He was somewhat of an authority figure to the younger ones.

"John is still an everyday person and we need more people like that in Congress because too many people there have never had a job and never had to balance a budget before."

Some Republicans believe that Mr Obama has allowed his personal animus to drive an anti-Boehner campaign that could well backfire. Shortly after Mr Obama won the 2008 election, Mr Boehner described him as a "chicken shit" for voting "present" so many times in the Illinois Senate. Reacting to Mr Obama's health care bill, which narrowly passed but appears to be an electoral millstone around Democratic necks, Mr Boehner shouted "Hell, no you can't!" on the House floor.

Liberal elements of the American press have enthusiastically taken up the Democratic theme of Mr Boehner as an out-of-touch plutocrat.

When the "New York Times" ran a front-page story this week under the banner "A GOP Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists", Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama's press secretary, sent a web link to article via Twitter, stating: "Headline says it all."

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank obliged by a description of Mr Boehner's "polished tassel loafers and perfectly tailored suit, a quarter-inch of white cuff revealed at the wrist".

Mrs Meineke said that at family gatherings at Andy's Bar Mr Boehner's nephews were more impressed by his Secret Service guards than the Congressman himself. "You see how he talks to Obama. He tells it how it is, right there in black and white. If all they can find on him is that he plays golf and he has a tan, well, whatever."

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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