Did President Obama psych out John Boehner?

Commentators have been wondering why President Obama has been calling out John Boehner on the midterm campaign trail. He's descending from the foggy peaks of the Oval Office to elevate a man that many Americans hadn't heard of -- just some "congressman from Cincinnati, for Pete's sake" was George Will's snarky throwaway line from This Week on Sunday, curiously leaving out that Boehner is also, um, the minority leader of the House of Representatives and, possibly, the chamber's next speaker -- not just some congressman the president chose by opening the Almanac of American Politics to a random page.

Defenders of the president's call-out-Boehner strategy respond that it's smart to define explicitly the choice voters face this November. It's not between Obama's Democrats and some faceless, generic Republican into whom voters can pour their hopes. It's between Obama's party and that of an orange-faced establishment GOPer who worked his way up the congressional leadership during the less-than-frugal Bush years.

But the strategy's results also depended on Boehner's reaction. Substance aside, if the minority leader appeared to win a rhetorical joust with Obama -- or at least to hold his own -- he could make the contrast between himself and the House Democratic majority more positive while making the president look small. Instead, Boehner seems to have flinched in the attention Sunday, when he said that perhaps he would agree to extend Bush's "middle-class" tax cuts without extending those for the wealthy -- a capitulation, even if it makes for sensible compromise. It's impossible to tell whether this was a result of the president's assault. But that hardly matters. Given the White House pressure, any gaffe would have gotten more scrutiny than usual and made the minority leader look unready to take on the president.

Now, the story is about Boehner, his subsequent backpedaling on his Sunday tax-cut comments and the reality that the Republican position on the Bush tax breaks is difficult to maintain politically. His reaction has fed into the White House's effort to distinguish the president's party from the opposition in positive terms. Even if this doesn't reshape the midterm elections -- it almost certainly won't -- Boehner's mistake has probably made it easier to pass a tax-cut plan the president likes, at least in the House.