Here is Berny Belvedere at American Thinker:
We can boil down conservative dissatisfaction with the speaker to two main criticisms: (1) he did not resist President Obama’s liberal agenda as fully as he could have, and (2) he did not articulate a conservative alternative to Obama winsomely enough.
In his nearly five full years as speaker, Boehner did much to slash spending. But he also did much to avoid putting the kind of pressure on Obama that conservatives clamored for. Recall that Boehner was elevated to speaker during the 2010 midterm elections, widely regarded as the high political moment of Tea Party sentiment. The resounding message from conservative voters was that they wanted significant pushback against the president’s agenda – not just in terms of winning legislative victories, but in terms of vocalizing their deep antipathy toward the president’s attempts to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”
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Boehner, unlike Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s, has lacked anything resembling a political vision able to win over the American public. I have spoken of Obama’s ability to present his policies in shiny packaging. There was nothing of comparable political allure from Boehner, nothing approximating a captivating ideological profile that could run counter to the president’s project to reshape America along even more liberal lines. In short, Boehner lacked the political imagination to succeed as the president’s most visible legislative opponent.
It’s striking that Boehner, who played an important role in Gingrich’s “Contract with America” in 1994, would fail to understand how important it is to captivate the public. Gingrich’s Contract, issued under circumstances similar to the opportunities Boehner himself enjoyed in 2011, was a sharp, forceful, and dynamic alternative to Bill Clinton’s political agenda. By contrast, 2010’s “Pledge to America” came up well short of offering a lasting, winsome conservative alternative to Obama. It was too defensive, too reactionary, too negative. (Interestingly, it was penned by Kevin McCarthy, the current odds-on favorite to assume the speakership once Boehner resigns next month.)
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: www.thefederalist.com.
