John Boehner’s introduction to the political force that would make him the Speaker of the House of Representatives came on a cool April afternoon in 2009, on the streets of Bakersfield, California. Boehner, the Republican House leader, had come to town for a fund-raiser for his colleague Kevin McCarthy, who represents the area. The event was scheduled for tax day, April 15th—the date targeted for a series of nationwide protest rallies organized by a loosely joined populist movement that called itself the Tea Party. One rally was to take place in Bakersfield, and Boehner and McCarthy decided to make an appearance. “They were expecting a couple of hundred people,” Boehner recalls. “A couple of thousand showed up.”

Boehner is now the most important Republican in the country, but far from the best known, which carries some advantage. Photograph by WIN MCNAMEE / GETTY

The two congressmen witnessed a scene of the sort that played in an endless loop across the country for the next eighteen months: people in funny hats waving Gadsden flags and wearing T-shirts saying “No taxation with crappy representation,” venting about bailouts, taxes, entrenched political élites, and an expanding and seemingly pampered public sector. (Noticing an open window in a nearby government office building, some in the Bakersfield crowd shouted, “Shut that window! You’re wasting my air-conditioning!”) Although Bakersfield is in one of the most conservative districts in California, the Tea Party speakers assigned fault to Republicans as well as to Democrats. The event’s organizers had been advised that Boehner and McCarthy would be there but did not invite them to speak.

For Boehner, the Bakersfield rally was a revelation. “I could see that there was this rebellion starting to grow,” he says now. “And I didn’t want our members taking a shellacking as a result.”

Back in Washington, Boehner reported what he’d seen to his Republican colleagues. While many Democrats and the mainstream media mocked the Tea Party, Boehner pressed his members to get out in front of the movement or, at least, get out of its way. “I urge you to get in touch with these efforts and connect with them,” he told a closed-door meeting of the Republican Conference. “The people participating in these protests will be the soldiers for our cause a year from now.”

Boehner seemed an unlikely clarion for an anti-establishment revolt. He had been in Congress since 1991, during the Bush-Quayle Administration—long enough to have twice climbed from the back bench to a leadership position. He was a friend of Ted Kennedy’s, and a champion of George W. Bush’s expansive No Child Left Behind legislation. After the economic collapse of 2008, he had reluctantly advocated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“a crap sandwich,” he called it), the Tea Partiers’ litmus test of political villainy.

But Boehner was among the first Beltway Republicans to recognize that the rise of the Tea Party represented, for Republicans, a near-miracle of good luck. At the start of the Obama era, the G.O.P. was a battered and exhausted party, suffering not only defeat but something like an existential crisis. The Republican claim to competence had been squandered during the Bush years, along with its rationale of limited government. A brisk business arose in the writing of conservatism’s obituary, and not just on the left. Declaring Reaganism dead, influential public intellectuals on the right, like David Frum and Ross Douthat, urged a new conservatism that accommodated itself to the public’s apparent acceptance of an activist government, suggesting such policy prescriptions as a national anti-obesity campaign (featuring a “fat tax”) and the payment of subsidies to working-class single men to make them more attractive marriage prospects. Independents, spooked by the Bush-era mixture of “compassionate conservatism” and faith-based activism, seemed irretrievably lost to the G.O.P.

The emergence of the Tea Party, Boehner says, forced upon Republicans, in one cycle, a rebranding that otherwise might have taken the Party a generation to achieve. The channelling of the Tea Party transformed the House Republicans. When the 112th Congress convenes, next month, a third of the Republican members will be freshmen, bound to a mood of deep disaffection. “None of these folks are coming in saying, ‘Mommy, may I?’ ” Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House Speaker, observes.

That presents a challenge to Boehner, who has served for twenty years and certainly noticed that, during the campaign, some Republican candidates made a point of not pledging to vote for him as Speaker. But Boehner aggressively wooed the insurgents, spending much of the summer travelling, often by motor coach, to campaign events—he attended more than a hundred and sixty—and donating millions of dollars from his own campaign chest to the challengers. He adopted the overheated Tea Party rhetoric in vowing to dismantle the Obama health-care plan (“this monstrosity”), and, after the election, he announced a renewal of the Republican moratorium on budgetary earmarks and forswore domestic travel by military jet, a relished perk of his predecessors.

As the transition to the new Congress began, in mid-November, Boehner avoided potential conflicts with his freshman colleagues by promising them a seat at the leadership table and two places on the steering committee that will choose committee chairs. When the freshmen told Boehner that they still felt underrepresented, he gave them a second leadership position and a third steering-committee seat. As it turned out, the transition drama came from the Democratic side, where forty-three members voted against making Nancy Pelosi the minority leader. Boehner and his Republican leadership team won unanimous election.

“When it comes to the issues of cutting spending, creating jobs, dealing with Obamacare, reforming Congress—this unites all of our members, including all eighty-five brand-new ones,” Boehner told me as Congress left Washington for the Thanksgiving recess. “There’s no daylight between the freshmen and any of our members or the leadership.”

But Boehner doesn’t imagine that managing the Tea Party Congress will be as smooth as the transition has been. Gaps between the freshmen and the leadership may well appear when Boehner and his team decide how to proceed on health care, and there is already disagreement between Boehner and some of the newcomers, including at least one freshman member of the leadership team, about how to control the federal deficit. The matter of raising the government’s ceiling on the national debt is a particular concern. Last February, Congress raised the debt limit to $14.2 trillion; the debt is already nearing that point, and will reach it—fulfilling obligations that the government has already incurred—by the time warm weather arrives. Before then, Congress will have to decide whether or not to once again raise the debt limit. (The least of the consequences of doing otherwise would be havoc in the bond market.)

A similar fight in 1995 led to a shutdown of the government, and played disastrously for Newt Gingrich’s Republicans. Clinton’s handling of the situation was masterly, Gingrich’s clumsy. What Republicans considered a principled stand for fiscal restraint played as an act of petulance (Gingrich had publicly complained about having been forced to sit at the rear of the plane on a Presidential trip); Clinton’s approval ratings rose as Gingrich’s plummeted. Boehner and his team will have to convince Republicans that it really is in their best interest to go along with something they vowed, as candidates, to oppose. “This is going to be probably the first really big adult moment” for the new Republican majority, Boehner told me. “You can underline ‘adult.’ And for people who’ve never been in politics it’s going to be one of those growing moments. It’s going to be difficult, I’m certainly well aware of that. But we’ll have to find a way to help educate members and help people understand the serious problem that would exist if we didn’t do it.”

Boehner won’t take the Speaker’s gavel until January 5th, but his unofficial elevation came in September, when President Obama, campaigning to salvage the Democratic majority in Congress, began to frame the election as a chance to save the republic from John Boehner. In a forty-five-minute speech on the economy on September 8th, Obama called out Boehner, by name, eight times. The President seemed almost to be wishing for the gift that voters had handed Bill Clinton with the Republican sweep of 1994—a polarizing opposition figure. Clinton needed to regain the middle in order to save his Presidency, and Newt Gingrich, from the start of his Speakership, proved an obliging foil. The ’94 results were barely in when Gingrich made his first public appearance as presumptive Speaker, displaying in a morning-after press conference the qualities that made his tenure at once so exhilarating and so exhausting, to ally and foe alike. Assuming the tone of one addressing a roomful of particularly dim children, Gingrich, a former history professor, lectured the press (“You guys are so deeply committed to a negative view”), critiqued the Democratic dilemma (“The Democrats adopted a McGovernite view of foreign policy and military power, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society structure of the welfare state, and counterculture values”), and fixed the Republican victory in historical perspective (“I think you probably have to go back to at least 1946 to find an election as decisive”). He declared the new Republican majority a band of “revolutionaries” with a warrant from the American people. “Every time you’ve had an election that clear-cut, the word that has always been used to describe it is a ‘mandate,’ ” Gingrich said. “I mean, if this is not a mandate to move in a particular direction, I would like somebody to explain to me what a mandate would look like.”

Gingrich’s style, and his Speaker-as-Prime Minister approach, facilitated the famous Clinton pivot, insuring the triangulator a second term that outlasted Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker. When I asked Boehner whether he saw the Republican victory of 2010, which was at least as decisive as Gingrich’s, as a mandate, he seemed almost to recoil. “No, no, noooooo,” he said. “I have watched people in the past deal with this issue, whether it’s Speaker Gingrich, or Speaker Pelosi, or President Obama. And we made a very conscious decision that we were not going to go down that path. The tone that we set is very important. You saw it on Election Night, and you’ve seen it since.”

Boehner forbade a Republican victory party on November 2nd, and has since signalled that he means to play the “adult” card in his dealings with Obama and within his own House conference. It is the strongest play he has. Unlike Gingrich, Boehner is not a visionary; his politics were formed by his revulsion, as a small businessman in Ohio, at the size of his tax bill. Nor is he an extemporaneous rhetorician; in public appearances, he rarely strays from his script. Where Gingrich was at once the Party’s chief political theorist, strategist, and messenger, Boehner is happy to delegate those roles to the young comers around him: Eric Cantor, the next Majority Leader; Kevin McCarthy, who will be the Republican Whip; and Paul Ryan, the G.O.P.’s designated thinker on the big issues, like entitlement reform. “We have very different personalities and different styles,” Gingrich told me recently. “You have to measure Boehner against other Boehners—you can’t measure him against me. Boehner would tell you up front that he’s not attempting to be the defining figure of this moment. He’s trying to be the organizer of the team that may define the moment. Clinton was able to pivot with me because I was a large enough figure that Clinton could say to the left, ‘You really want Gingrich?’ And they’d go, ‘O.K., even though we’re really mad at you, we’re not that mad at you.’ This may be an argument for the Boehner model.”

Boehner is now the most important Republican in the country, but far from the best known, which carries some advantage. Washington is familiar with him as an amiable, somewhat prosaic conservative with an umbilical connection to business, an old-school pol who loves his golf, his wine, and his cigarettes. His physical aspect—the mahogany skin tone, the smoky baritone, the Ken-doll coif, and the impeccably dapper attire—lends itself to caricature with a throwback theme. (Dean Martin and Don Draper are two press favorites.) Lately, Boehner has taken to reciting his personal biography, perhaps partly to counter the caricature, but also as a device for framing his approach to the job as the uncomplicated application of ordinary American common sense. “Trust me—all the skills I learned growing up are the skills I need to do my job,” he says.

Boehner was reared in Reading, Ohio, a small working-class community outside Cincinnati, where everybody he knew went to Sunday Mass at one of the town’s two parish churches. (A local joke defined a “mixed marriage” as the union of a Sacred Heart girl and a boy from Sts. Peter and Paul, situated less than two miles away.) Boehner’s ancestors had come to Ohio in one of the German immigration waves of the nineteenth century. His paternal grandfather, Andrew, opened a homely little tavern—Andy’s Café, on the industrial edge of Cincinnati—which holds a central place in the Boehner story. When Boehner was growing up, his father, Earl, ran the place, rising each morning at four in order to open the bar at six for the local early-shift workers, who would stop by for a shot and a beer before punching in. Boehner spent much of his youth in the bar, doing chores and, eventually, tending bar. “You have to learn to deal with every character that walks in the door,” Boehner has said, to explain that he was prepared to handle the incoming congressional freshmen.

Earl and Mary Ann Boehner had twelve children, nine boys and three girls, whom they brought up in a single-story stone-slab box of a house that had one bathroom and, for much of John’s early life, only two bedrooms. The boys slept, barracks style, on bunks in one room, their sisters in another, and Earl and Mary Ann used a pullout sofa. (Eventually, when the oldest children were teen-agers, the family added two bedrooms onto the back of the house.) The place was on a hilltop in the part of Reading that was considered “the country”; there were no city snowplow services and water was (and is still) collected in a cistern. On school days, the children were assigned shifts for morning bathroom access. “I used to sleep over there a lot, and my one vivid memory of their house is that I’ve never, ever been there when there wasn’t diapers hanging all over,” Jerry Vanden Eynden, Boehner’s closest friend since childhood, says. “If it was the summertime, diapers were hanging outside. If it was winter, the basement was full. It was just diapers.” Bob Boehner, the eldest child, remembers coming home on leave from the Army in the early nineteen-seventies and finding his youngest brother asleep in his bed. “I told him to get out of my bed, and he didn’t know who I was,” he recalls.

The older children—John was the second-oldest—were expected to help organize and, occasionally, discipline the younger ones, and all the children worked. Most of them put in time at Andy’s, mopping the floor or stacking cases of beer. (The family no longer owns the place, but Boehner’s sister Linda still works behind the bar.) One Sunday every year, Earl would close up, and, after Mass, the family would spend the day at Andy’s, wiping down the walls and windows with ammonia, removing the layers of cigarette tar. Earl and Mary Ann were both heavy smokers, as is John (reportedly two packs a day); Mary Ann, who died of pulmonary failure in 1998, smoked until the very end. “She was on oxygen and still smoked,” Bob recalls. “She’d take the oxygen off and smoke. And we’d come in and see her and she’d put the cigarette down, and the smoke would come up. And we’d say, ‘Mom, if you’re gonna smoke, you’ve gotta go in the other room.’ She was hard-core.”

The Boehner children went to parochial grade schools, and, with tuition help from their parish, all nine boys attended Moeller High, the big new Catholic boys’ school in Cincinnati. Moeller was a football powerhouse, coached by the future Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust, and Boehner became a reliable, if unspectacular, two-position regular as a linebacker and a center, earning Faust’s respect for playing with pain after suffering a back injury. (Boehner’s high-school nickname was, inevitably, Boner.) He graduated in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when every young man’s first concern was the draft.

Boehner’s parents couldn’t afford college, and the deferment that came with it, so Boehner took what jobs he could find to earn his own way, working as a roofer, a referee, and a heavy-equipment operator. He and his crowd dreaded Vietnam but didn’t protest the war. “There wasn’t much antiwar protest in this area,” Bob Boehner says. “All our fathers fought in the Second World War, and they wouldn’t have put up with any antiwar protesters.” At one point, John and Jerry Vanden Eynden took off for Florida and bummed around for a few months. When they returned, Boehner, facing the inevitable, enlisted in the Navy. His construction experience helped him land in the Seabees, where he was dispatched to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to help residents dig out from Hurricane Camille. In Mississippi, he re-injured his back, and was honorably discharged after less than six months’ service.