John Boehner certainly has his defenders, particularly on Capitol Hill, where his support might simply be a matter of no one else wanting the hassle of being Speaker of the House. But buried in a USA Today headline about the public’s overall dissatisfaction with Boehner’s performance is this little detail:

Now, if you’re a Capitol Hill Republican consultant type who thinks it’s an accomplishment that Harry Reid hasn’t been able to kill the sequester cuts (yet), you can scoff at this and bemoan the undue influence of those unhinged Tea Party types who follow that horrible Ted Cruz.

If you had to choose, would you rather see John Boehner remain as Speaker of the House, or would you rather see Boehner replaced as Speaker by another Republican?

Or you might say Boehner was put in a no-win position, because the Tea Partiers forced him to go the shutdown route, the result of which was that Tea Partiers were unhappy (because nothing was accomplished), while moderates were unhappy because they never wanted to see the shutdown in the first place.

But consider what you’re really saying when you make these arguments on Boehner’s behalf. You’re acknowledging that he is in no way a leader – of Republicans in general, of any faction therein, or even of House Republicans insofar as he is being pulled between different agendas instead of setting the agenda himself.

We know what the Tea Party wants – to get rid of ObamaCare and cut spending. We know what the establishment wants – to keep GOP poll numbers looking good to set up for the mid-terms. What is Boehner’s priority? How does he propose to achieve it? Does anyone know?

More Republicans want a different leader than still want him because he is not a strong leader in any sense of the word, and that is something Republicans desperately need in Washington right now. We have a Democratic president who is presiding over a health care disaster, a weak economy and a burgeoning debt – and yet Republicans are suffering in the polls?

You can blame Ted Cruz all you want for that, but if you don’t like the way Cruz leads, why doesn’t the guy who’s supposed to lead actually do it? If he would deem to do so, and effectively at that, he wouldn’t have a plurality of Republicans asking for a different Speaker.