Is John Boehner actually an American hero?

The House Speaker had a bleak December and a blah two years. But it could have been so much worse...

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio): Congressional bomb diffuser?
(Image credit: Pete Marovich/ZUMA Press/Corbis)

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) isn't anyone's idea of a latter-day LBJ or Sam Rayburn — a super-legislator who twists arms, swaps pork for votes, and most of all, gets stuff done. But despite his rough December and New Year's — in which his own caucus humiliated him by rejecting his fiscal cliff "Plan B," he was cut out of negotiations before having to join Democrats to pass a Senate-brokered bill, survived an incompetent coup attempt, and was trash-talked on live TV by Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) — "Boehner has done his country a more important service over the last two years than almost any other politician in Washington," says Ross Douthat in The New York Times.

That service hasn't been the achievement of a grand bargain with the White House, which he has at times assiduously sought. Nor has it been the sweeping triumph over liberalism that certain right-wing activists expect him to somehow gain. Rather, it's been a kind of disaster management — a sequence of bomb-defusal operations that have prevented our dysfunctional government from tipping into outright crisis.... The fact that all these crises have been resolved at the 11th hour, amid persistent brinkmanship and repeated near-death moments for his speakership, isn't a sign that he's a failure. Instead, given the correlation of forces he's dealing with, this is what success looks like. (For a glimpse of the alternative, just imagine rerunning the last two years with Newt Gingrich in the speaker's chair.) [The New York Times]

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.