Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

Crybaby. Wimp. Sensitive man. The reviews of John Boehner’s sobfest in a “60 Minutes” profile last Sunday have been all over the map, fueling a debate on when it’s appropriate for men in public life to cry.

Barbara Walters said the incoming speaker of the House has an emotional problem, and that if Nancy Pelosi had been such a serial bawler, she’d never have heard the end of it. Walters’s colleague on “The View,” Joy Behar, called Boehner “The Weeper of the House.” And Sean Hannity of Fox said people should lay off Boehner, because when right-wingers cry it’s not a sign of weakness.

What’s been missing is the reason why Boehner cries so much. Around Washington, he’s known as a chain-smoking, Merlot-swilling, golf-loving conservative hardliner. Lobbyists love him, no more so than when he handed out checks from the tobacco industry to compliant members of Congress on the House floor.

It’s when he talks about how he rose from his humble past — the son of a bar owner, one of 12 children who grew up in a small home with a single bathroom — that Boehner starts to weep.

“Making sure these kids have a shot at the American Dream like I did is very important,” he said, choking up, when asked on “60 Minutes” about his crying.

But a look at Boehner’s record during his two decades in Congress shows a man who has voted against nearly every boost for the working stiff. There’s no empathy for those with the longest shots at the American Dream in his voting pattern. Instead, we see a politician who is hard-hearted in his legislative treatment of the people now coping with the kind of economic conditions in which the Boehner family grew up.



The American Dream that Boehner evokes between tears has never been more threatened. By some measures, social mobility — that is, the ability of people to move up a notch in class — is at an all-time low in this country. Poor Americans now have less than a 5 percent chance of rising to the upper-middle-class within their lifetimes.

At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor, and the concentration of wealth owned by those at the very top, has never been so great. After examining these trends, The Economist wrote that “the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”

Numerous studies have shown that what knocks people out of the middle class, or keeps them from ever joining it, is a catastrophic bill or two — usually from getting sick and not having health care. Then, those debts go on credit cards, which leads to a misery hole of high interest and limited choices.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Against this backdrop, Boehner has fought against strivers and strugglers at the lower end, while shilling for ever-more concentrated corporate power and banker control. The one thing that stirs his passion is tax cuts. But nearly half of American households don’t pay any income tax at all, so Boehner’s crusade doesn’t affect them. And a decade of aggressive tax-cutting has done nothing to reverse the woes of everyday working people.

Boehner voted for the major trade agreements that make it easier to ship jobs overseas, while voting against assistance to workers who lose jobs to globalization. He voted no on expanding health care for poor children, no on raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, and no on a bill to allow people to purchase F.D.A.-certified prescription drugs at a cheaper price from certain countries.

So: he wants to deny health care to poor children, let millionaires hold onto more of their money while blocking a small raise for the lowest earners and prevent people on fixed incomes from getting a break on the costliest item in their personal budget — their meds.

Boehner got a zero rating from Citizens for Tax Justice, a nonprofit founded in 1979 to give average people a greater voice on tax policy amidst a stadium full of lobbyists for the rich.

More recently, he voted against modifying bankruptcy rules — rebuffing an effort to help people avoid mortgage foreclosures. He said no to the federal rescue of General Motors, which saved the American auto industry, countless jobs in Boehner’s Midwest, and did it all without a long-lasting hit on the Treasury. And he gave a thumbs down to regulation of the subprime mortgage industry.

Like Boehner’s father, my grandmother in Chicago owned a small bar that catered to a working-class clientele. She lived above the bar, a widowed single mother, working seven days a week. What saved her in her old age was a great, expansive government program that allowed so many Americans to live out the last decades of their lives in dignity — Medicare. Yes, that single-payer, socialized medical system that Boehner would surely vote against if it came up today.

For whatever reason, Boehner’s life story never gave him a broader governing vision for the folks he knew in his hometown of Reading, Ohio. When he turns on the waterworks while talking about them, it raises two questions:

Is Boehner crying because he escaped that fate? Or because of the person he has become — a politician whose votes show he couldn’t care less for the people he left behind?