"Where's The Train Wreck?"
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TAYLORVILLE, Ill. — Forget Obamacare. Forget his lawsuit against the president. Provocation isn’t the tone Speaker John Boehner is going for this summer.
As he began his annual monthlong, 14-state bus tour this week, the Ohio Republican left many of the red-meat issues that rev up his base back in Washington. Instead, he’s trying to promote a different message: Republicans are doing the legislating while everyone else is slacking off.
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In the opening days of the tour, Boehner only once talked about President Barack Obama’s health care law, and it was an offhand remark. He said entitlement programs need “tweaks,” not the massive overhaul Republicans have voted for. There was no explicit mention of suing Obama — just a brief nod to trying to “stop the president’s overreach.”
“When you hear all this stuff about the Congress, understand there are two bodies in the Congress,” Boehner said during a morning fundraiser in Bolingbrook, a suburb of Chicago. “One is working our rear ends off, and frankly, you’d be surprised all the stuff we do is done on a bipartisan basis. [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid didn’t even try to pass a border bill that we passed last Friday.”
In an interview this week with POLITICO, Boehner explained the strategy, and said his party doesn’t talk enough about how it wants to govern. He said he’s pushed members to “talk more about solutions” in the months leading up to the November election.
“We’ve got solutions,” a casually dressed Boehner said aboard his blue rented coach bus here in central Illinois. “And one of the things I’ve been pushing the members on the last couple of weeks, talk more about solutions.”
He added: “We don’t want to take the heat for the fact that [the Senate] can’t do their work.”
Boehner’s tone is a contrast to what’s been happening in Washington. After an Obamacare-fueled government shutdown, and two years of partisan feuding, leading Republicans are trying to shed the party’s combative image. This summer is a chance for Boehner to road-test a new message and highlight priorities that might garner broader support.
He rolled out a five-point plan to take advantage of an uptick in energy production. He’s also boasting about a handful of recent legislative victories, including reforming the Veterans Affairs Department, keeping federal spending low and making short-term patches to highway and farm policies.
But risk lies ahead during this election season. The government is slated to shut down after Sept. 30, and Boehner’s leadership team needs to find a way to keep the coffers full. They’ll have just a few days in September to figure that out. And the productive message is slightly undermined due to the fact that the House hasn’t been able to move immigration reform, which the Senate passed by a wide margin.
But Boehner keeps forging ahead on this bus tour. The trip is far from glamorous: He typically travels with one aide, a friend and a phalanx of Capitol Police officers. Cheese puffs and other snacks are stashed in the kitchenette. But the road show is a way for Boehner to try to beat back the do-nothing narrative one town at a time, while raising hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars for Republicans. The bus has a bald eagle emblazoned between its headlights.
And the tour has obvious benefits for Boehner. He is building support among colleagues by visiting small towns like this — goodwill that could come in handy when he faces reelection as speaker in January.
The positive tone isn’t uniform. Boehner spends plenty of time sharply lambasting Democrats — especially Reid and Obama.
He told a crowd outside Chicago that Senate Democrats and Obama have helped the GOP’s political fortunes because they’ve acted with “incompetence” and “arrogance.” Boehner accused Reid of ignoring House-passed bills so he could “[protect] his members from difficult votes.”
Obama, Boehner said, is simply checked out.
“We got a president, listen, it’s his birthday,” Boehner said here at a bar packed with 250 people. “I called him today to wish him a happy birthday. Told his staff, ‘Tell him I said happy birthday.’ And he sends me an email back telling me how good his golf game is. I wanted to reply, but I didn’t. I did not reply, I wanted to, because I would’ve said a few things.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/john-boehner-tour-republicans-109777.html#ixzz39fmH5CDI
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