Boehner: From cafe to country club

WASHINGTON - Assuming he is elected the next Speaker of the House of Representatives next January, John Boehner will, according to the Constitution, be two heartbeats from the presidency.

More important, until his party chooses its presidential nominee for 2012, he will be the most powerful Republican in America.

The impact of the Tea Party movement may have been the biggest talking point of these mid-term elections.

But after the largest Republican House landslide since 1946, it will be up to Boehner to marshal his potentially unruly forces - and decide how far, if at all, to work with President Barack Obama and the Democrats in the two years of divided government that lie ahead.

The answer is anyone's guess. The next Speaker is remarkably hard to categorise.

He is a "country-club" Republican - an avid golfer with a fondness for sharp suits and a famous year-round suntan.

Yet he is not a country-club Republican in the image of George Bush Snr. The Boehner background is humble.

He grew up in a working-class Catholic family near Cincinnati. His parents were Democrats and his father ran a small cafe.

Their son was the first member of the family to attend university. As salesman for, and later boss of, a small plastics company, he turned into a Republican, but is a conservative with a small "c".

His origins could not be more different from Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat from whom he will take over the House gavel.

She is the daughter of a former Congressman and long-time Mayor of Baltimore, an unabashed liberal identified with the central San Francisco district she has represented since 1987.

Those qualities made her the lightning rod for the surge of anti-government sentiment that destroyed House Democrats on Wednesday.

Boehner's ascent was rapid. In 1984 he was elected to the Ohio state legislature, and in 1990 won the seat for Congress in Washington after the incumbent Republican was embroiled in a sex scandal.

As one of an upstart "Gang of Seven" of new Republican Congressmen, he harassed the complacent Democratic leadership, contributing to the Republican triumph of 1994.

Democrats regard Boehner as irredeemably partisan. But although combative, he is less ideological than former Speaker Newt Gingrich then, and the Tea Party now.

He even briefly indicated a readiness to compromise on extending the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush, the fate of which will be decided over the next few weeks by the outgoing "lame-duck" Congress.

- INDEPENDENT