Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.

The longest hour of John Boehner’s career began after noon on January 3, 2013. Boehner, perpetually besieged by his party’s right wing, was waiting to find out if he would win reelection as speaker of the House, and he was facing an unexpectedly tough fight from Tea Party upstarts trying to eject him from a job so thankless it was hard to see why anyone would want it.

Boehner smokes more or less constantly when he’s out of the public eye, and the elegant marbled corridor outside his office on the second floor of the Capitol invariably smells like a bowling alley from the 1970s. But on that chilly midwinter day, Boehner was chain-smoking his filtered Camel 99s at a particularly hell-fire pace. Inside his office, the speaker hunched nervously over his small desk with its expansive view of the frozen National Mall, waiting by himself, staring at a plaque of the Breton Fisherman’s Prayer, a replica of one that sat on President John F. Kennedy’s desk. “O, God,” it reads, “Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”


“I don’t know, I must have read that thing 500 times over that hour, hour and a half,” Boehner told me in early December. While we talked, a vote was taking place on the House floor on a symbolic Republican measure denouncing President Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration, its preordained outcome reflecting, for once, an unusually united House Republican Conference. But Boehner was already deep in negotiations to avert a second government shutdown in as many years, which would nearly fail a few days later during what should have been a perfunctory procedural vote after a handful of conservatives bucked him. With conservative media hammering him as a sellout (Fox’s Sean Hannity is already calling him “cowardly” for not using the vote to extract concessions from Obama) and Tea Party members straining at the leash again, our conversation turned to his political near-death experience nearly two years earlier.

“I was in my chair the whole time sitting all by myself, right there on my rear,” he remembered, sinking into an oxblood leather wingback chair, in crisp white shirtsleeves, cigarette smoldering in hand as he talked.

“It was, uhhh, trying ...”

***

Boehner’s dinghy made it through the storm that day—just barely, by six votes—and he is expected to have it easier (despite a last-minute challenge by conservatives) when the 114th Congress convenes on January 6, 2015, to reelect him as its speaker.

This should be his moment, after all. Republicans in the House of Representatives just picked up 13 seats in the midterm elections, giving the party its largest majority in the chamber since 1928. At least some credit goes to Boehner’s tireless fundraising—he claims he raised $100 million for GOP candidates—and victory would seem to offer Boehner more job security and a cushion against future rebellions in his own party. But the 65-year-old bartender’s son knows how quickly fortunes can turn, and his friends say the 2013 vote—and subsequent embarrassment of being forced to go along with a government shutdown he tried to stop his own members from supporting—left him with a seasick feeling, a sense of being perpetually buffeted by forces greater than himself. “He’s the same happy-go-lucky guy, but there’s a little more anger there, a little more explosiveness” since that vote, says one former member who remains close to Boehner.

The Many Faces of John Boehner | Getty Images; Associated Press; Corbis Images

His first four years in the office are more notable for survival than accomplishment. Liberals call Boehner the weakest speaker ever to hold the office, or, as author Michael Tomasky wrote, “easily the worst House speaker in modern history.” Some conservatives, especially those in talk radio, agree, blaming him for not standing up sufficiently to the liberal Democratic president they loathe. “This guy’s a joke,” says syndicated host Mark Levin, who has long agitated for Boehner’s ouster. And the public, disgusted by the gridlock, has given Congress the lowest approval ratings ever recorded, bottom-dwelling around 10 percent. When all was said and done, the 113th Congress enacted just 296 laws, the second least of any Congress in the past half-century.

Through it all, Boehner has been in charge, but never entirely in control, and he muddled along with a depressing cycle of legislative crises and shoestring salvations. A bargainer by nature saddled with members who didn’t want to bargain, he would negotiate and negotiate—only to have a big bloc of his conference emphatically reject almost any deal. Each time, Boehner would end up being bailed out by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell or House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who would cobble together enough votes to salvage a deal with Obama.

Still, Boehner survived, battered but intact. And today there is no other political leader in the country who owes so much of his success to sheer resilience and the capacity to endure repeated public humiliation with a shrug. That Boehner shrug—that “I’m just playing the cards I’ve been dealt,” nicotine-induced zen—drives his bargaining partners crazy, but it might have finally set him up to do bigger things, if he’s willing to take the risk. “He held things together, and now they are in a much stronger position,” says former Speaker Newt Gingrich, who ushered Boehner into the leadership two decades ago.

Image Hold On. John Boehner Has Something in His Eye. Again. (Click to view gallery.) | AP/Getty

“I don’t do anger,” Boehner told me with a straight face. And there’s some truth to it: His wife, Debbie, I was told, was incensed enough for both Boehners—and begged him to use the powers of the speakership to punish the defectors who had nearly cost him his career in 2013. Boehner refused.

Now, of course, Boehner actually has a chance to get something done. If he can keep his fractious Republicans together—and not get blindsided by his own team on the other side of the Capitol. If he can deal with a White House that, sources told me, has all but given up on the idea that Boehner can actually deliver. Because, for all that’s changed in the wake of the midterm elections, one thing remains the same: John Boehner is still the uncertain fulcrum of the United States government, and his grip on an expanded House Republican majority remains surprisingly slippery. Can he transform his chamber from a legislative basket case into a place where, as he puts it, “the institution works”?

“He has no more places to hide,” says former Obama White House chief of staff Bill Daley, in a comment that reflects Obama’s personal view, according to several senior administration officials. “This is a Congress that he helped build. … The ‘Oh, I can’t control my people’ routine is wearing thin.”

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who served with Boehner in the 1990s, admires Boehner’s patience but says the time has come to risk everything to pass big bipartisan bills. “You need to say, ‘I’m the speaker, and while I am the speaker, I set the terms. If you don’t want me to be the speaker, then vote against me the next time. In the meantime, you have given me the responsibility, and I am going to make the decisions.’”

That’s not far from the answer I got from Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat who lost the speakership to Boehner in 2010—in part because she used her power to ram through controversial bills, like an ill-fated climate-change plan, that helped kill off a generation of swing-state Democrats. “I respect John as a person and like him as a friend,” she says. But “amateur hour” is her response when I ask how Boehner is currently managing the place. “The speaker of the House has awesome power, and as I said to him when [Boehner took the gavel in January 2011], when I was speaker I couldn’t always follow the wishes of my caucus. … Leadership means asserting your independence,” Pelosi adds.

Boehner is well aware of the damning assessments, and his aides say he has something up his sleeve. But still, when I pressed him about 2015, there wasn’t much in the way of big promises, just a sort of this-time-it-will-be-different hopefulness. “We didn’t get elected to come up here and stick our head in the sand,” he tells me. “We were elected to deal with big problems.”

The greatest spur for action might be personal, not political. In 2013, Boehner began musing with other members about calling it quits; he’s got a comfortable nest egg, listing assets of up to $6.8 million in his most recent financial disclosure forms. When I mention, in passing, that he is closer to the end than the beginning of his time in the House, he interrupts me: “No shit!”

There was a solid chance, friends and associates tell me, that he would have retired last year and headed down to his new condo in Marco Island, Florida, had Eric Cantor, the ambitious majority leader who stood behind him like a stalking butler, not been ousted by a rebel in the Republican primary. But senior Republican leaders have concluded that Kevin McCarthy, Boehner’s fresh-faced new majority leader from California, simply isn’t seasoned enough to take over the big job yet.

Besides, who would leave now, when he’s in the strongest position of his speakership—and his Democratic nemesis Harry Reid has been relegated to the sidelines? Privately, Boehner gives himself an “incomplete” grade as speaker, and he still talks about doing the big things he has always wanted to do: a major, multiyear deal to rationalize the tax code, entitlement reform and sustainable spending curbs, a bipartisan immigration package.

But Boehner is so practiced in the art of the narrow escape, so used to the politics of survival defining his tenure, that it’s not at all clear he has the instincts to go for broke. When I ask him to name his top priority, he lays out not a grand legislative bargain but a seemingly modest managerial goal that has eluded him for much of his time at the top: exercising enough control over his conference to pass spending bills through regular order.

When I point out that many of his old buddies have been saying the next year is “legacy” time for him, he just shrugs.

“I’m not really into legacy,” he says.

***

What Boehner lacks in a definable legacy, he makes up for with a classic American success story. He was raised in the working-class town of Reading, Ohio, population 10,000, just outside Cincinnati, the second of 12 children in a German-Irish family that ran Andy’s Café, a small bar and grill started by Boehner’s grandfather in the late 1930s. Boehner’s father, Earl, eventually built an extension on the family house, but for much of Boehner’s childhood, the family shared two bedrooms (boys in one room, sister in the other, parents on a fold-out couch in the living room) and a single bathroom. His mother, Mary Ann, began waking the kids before sunrise to ensure everybody got shower time. “You knew that if you didn’t get up you’d be cutting your time in the bathroom in half,” Boehner’s sister Lynda Meineke told a reporter a few years ago. “Sometimes, the boys had to go outside and pee by the tree.”

He has no more places to hide,” says former Obama White House chief of staff Bill Daley. “The ‘Oh, I can’t control my people’ routine is wearing thin.”

Boehner showed early promise as an athlete (he was a linebacker for future Notre Dame football coach Gerry Faust at Cincinnati’s all-boys Archbishop Moeller High School), but it took him six years to work his way through Xavier University, toiling in a series of humbling janitorial and construction jobs. After a brief stint in the Navy, Boehner found his calling—in sales. He couldn’t have picked a less glamorous end of the business, hawking the wares of local firms that made plastic products. But he was a natural and was running his own multimillion-dollar company by the mid-1980s.

Boehner had a cunning the other slick backslappers lacked. He admired Alabama pitchman and seminar guru Zig Ziglar, who preached positive thinking (“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude,” is the best-known Ziglar exhortation, a maxim Boehner still lives by), and took potential customers to $25-a-day Ziglar sessions. But his greatest asset, as rare in sales as in politics, was a willingness to shut up and listen. It’s a quality he admires in his friends and wishes he could see more of from Obama, who is prone to high-minded policy lectures.

“I was good, yeah,” Boehner tells me of his salesman days. “Everybody thinks you have to be a big talker, which is absolutely 100 percent wrong. The best salesmen are good listeners, because you can’t sell until you know what buttons to push. And you don’t know what buttons to push unless you are asking questions and listening.”

The barkeep's son | One of 12 children growing up in Ohio, Boehner (the middle boy on the grass in the photo on the left) took six years to graduate from college before making a fortune in sales and winning his House seat in 1990 (at bottom right, he celebrates with his family). To this day, he regularly eats breakfast at a Capitol Hill diner. | Courtesy of Speaker John Boehner; Bryant Avondoglio/Speaker Boehner's Office

His businessman’s distaste for regulation and taxes drew him to politics in the Reagan era. “I was determined, I was miserable and I didn’t have anything,” he said of his ascent in a 2010 New York Times interview. “I was trying to make something out of nothing.” Through his Chamber of Commerce connections, Boehner started the slow climb up the local Republican ladder, first as a township trustee, and by 1984 he had won a seat in the Ohio House of Representatives. In 1990, he got a big break: Southern Ohio Republican Rep. Buz Lukens insisted on running for reelection after a misdemeanor conviction for having sex with a 16-year-old girl, and Boehner won a tight GOP primary contest.

In Washington, another scandal gave Boehner the chance to make a quick mark on national politics. When revelations appeared of massive overdrafts by members of Congress at the House bank, he helped form the “Gang of Seven” to push for reform and generally taunt the Democratic majority. The Gang—and Boehner especially—became recruits in Gingrich’s congressional insurgency, helping to write and promote Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America.” When a Republican wave swept Gingrich into the speaker’s office that year, Boehner was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Republican Conference Committee, the No. 4 official in the new Republican leadership that would run the House for the first time in four decades.

From the start, Boehner was a curious amalgam of reformer and dapper defender of the establishment. He was an early and vehement opponent of the earmarks beloved by lobbyists (and committee chairmen), and his allies are fond of saying he was a “Tea Partyer before there was a Tea Party,” pointing to his Gang of Seven days as an agitator against House perks and committee seniority. But he loved his golf, his wine and his country clubs, hung out with K Street lobbyists, solicited their contributions and supported their deregulatory efforts, all the while looking like Hollywood’s version of a perma-tanned Beltway operator.

“He was just so cool, as cool as Dean Martin—I think I coined the Dean Martin thing,” recalls Armey, who was Gingrich’s No. 2. “His only Achilles’ heel was that he loved golf so much, it really cut against who he really was, the guy with blue-collar roots.”

The other thing cutting against the regular-guy reputation was his prowess as a fundraiser, fueled by a growing network of business and lobbying connections that collectively became known as the “Boehner machine.” He remains close to a bevy of top lobbyists for interests from Big Tobacco to Silicon Valley—some of them former staffers who routinely called his office, the New York Times has reported, to weigh in on legislation. Boehner hitched rides on their corporate jets, tapped them for campaign cash and leveraged his friendship to help fund GOP House candidates. In 1996—only a few years removed from his anti-House bank crusade—he was caught distributing campaign checks from tobacco lobbyists to members on the House floor. It wasn’t illegal, but an embarrassed Boehner apologized anyway.

It was hard, then as now, to find anybody in Washington who viscerally disliked Boehner. Even White House officials who question his leadership capacities say he is a good man, a good time and good on his word. He loves early dinners out (10 p.m. seems to be his immovable bedtime) and loves to bullshit about golf and the “knuckleheads” in his own party, often at Trattoria Alberto, a veal-and-pasta place on Capitol Hill with the same three Republican buddies—Senators Richard Burr of North Carolina and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Representative Tom Latham of Iowa—as many as three or four nights a week when Congress is in session. The four men even vacation together with their wives; last year, the couples stayed at Burr’s house in northern Michigan; before that, Boehner hosted in his Florida condo.

But if Boehner knows how to chill out, there are also startling eruptions of public emotion that vividly reveal the pressure he is under—weeping jags that crop up when he speaks about his crowded-house childhood in Ohio, during particularly moving renditions of “America the Beautiful,” any time he is around little kids (or veterans) or during moments of signal triumph, like his 2010 ascension to the speakership.

Boehner knows he is lucky to be where is—not just on account of his humble upbringing, but also because he was more or less written off for dead in the late 1990s. After his quick start in Congress and climb into leadership, he could not escape the fallout from Gingrich’s post-Bill Clinton impeachment collapse and was deposed from his post as the No. 4 Republican in the House after the party lost seats in the 1998 midterms.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of that defeat on Boehner. Being voted out of power was a body blow, and he took weeks to absorb it. He had already begun entertaining ambitions of becoming speaker someday, his friends told me, and no speaker in recent memory had clawed back from a similar setback. “That was a very hard one for John,” says Boehner buddy Mike Simpson, an affable Idaho congressman.

It left him with a sense of how fickle his fellow Republicans can be and fostered a lingering phobia against pushing his conference too far too fast, as he believed Gingrich had done by advocating the catastrophic 1995 government shutdown and articles of impeachment against President Clinton. And Boehner knows what a rebellion against a speaker looks like from the inside: He downplays it now, but he was part of a small group of Gingrich deputies, along with Armey and Tom DeLay, who discussed a coup against Gingrich in 1997.

When I point out that many of his old buddies have been saying the next year is “legacy” time for Boehner, he just shrugs. “I’m not really into legacy,” he says.

Mostly, the defeat helped shape a managerial philosophy that House insiders understand intuitively and outsiders find confounding: “letting the House work its will,” which translates into allowing members to let off steam rather than ramming bills through.

In his time out of leadership, Boehner labored on obscure subcommittees before he was eventually tapped to chair the House Education Committee, where he partnered with liberals on the No Child Left Behind and pension reform laws in the early 2000s. “We are going to smile. We are going to work hard,” he told a staffer, “and earn our way back.” And he did. By February 2006, his mellow, collaborative approach seemed much more appealing after DeLay, the hard-driving “Hammer” of the GOP Conference, had worn out his colleagues and resigned under indictment. Boehner, who had privately chafed at DeLay, was elected in an upset to replace him as majority leader under Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Here was vindication. But like everything in Boehner’s life, it was soon swamped by events: Democrats took back Congress nine months later. Hastert called it quits. And Boehner, once a political dead man walking, found himself in charge of House Republicans as their minority leader.

***

The speaker of the House, as envisioned in the Constitution, was designed to be a weak, mostly nonpartisan post. It took one of the giants of American congressional history, Kentucky Congressman Henry Clay, to harness the latent power of the office. After his election to the speakership in 1811, Clay began advocating for his own agenda and exerting influence on appointments to key committees. The speaker’s position started to grow to its current stature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through rules that severely limited the power of the minority to gum up the works—spearheaded by powerful GOP speakers like Tom “Czar” Reed, Joe Cannon and Nicholas Longworth.

Boehner was deposed from his post as the No. 4 Republican in 1998, swept up by Newt Gingrich's downfall. Today, he is speaker, now joined by Senate Leader Mitch McConnell in the majority. | Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly via Getty Images; J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

But in the long decades that Democrats held the House from the late New Deal through the Clinton presidency, they empowered committee chairs through a seniority system, creating a legacy of strong barons and turf wars that Republicans were determined to stifle when they finally seized the chamber in the 1990s. When Gingrich and his Gang of Seven took power, the first thing they did was shatter the seniority system by imposing six-year terms on committee chairs. Pelosi and Boehner have kept the tradition of the strong speakership going, and in fact, Boehner, while often professing his desire to return the House to “regular order,” has passed most of his major spending bills—including December’s deal—by using his authority under House rules to bring bills directly to the floor. “People may have differing views about his strength as a leader overall, but institutionally, Boehner has been a strong speaker—meaning he has maintained the strength of the speaker’s office,” says Fred Beuttler, former deputy historian of the House. “The power remains consolidated and solidified in the speakership.”

Yet, as Boehner knows too well, institutional power doesn’t guarantee political muscle. The best speakers derive clout from their ability to convince, at times bully, the membership into voting their way. And that kind of consensus has been an elusive commodity for Boehner. The first hint that he was headed for trouble came in the fall of 2008, when, as minority leader, Boehner struggled to rally support for President George W. Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program. He has always considered himself to be a quintessential conservative (he had a perennial 100 percent rating from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and zero rating from the environmentalist League of Conservation Voters). But he seemed unprepared for the wave of Republican anger growing by the end of the Bush administration.

The bailout bill—the biggest federal intervention in the private sector in decades—sparked an immediate backlash and eventually spawned the Tea Party movement. TARP did finally pass in October 2008, but not before two-thirds of Boehner’s members voted “no,” tanking the stock market—and after Boehner had delivered a tearful, futile call for a “yes” vote. “Congress has to do its job!” he cried, and not for the last time. Later, he referred to Republicans who bucked him on that vote as “knuckle-draggers.”

Two years later, Republicans took the House, and Boehner became speaker on the back of the Tea Party wave, which brought him the gavel but also an influx of 63 new Republican members, most animated by a desire to block just about any spending by the federal government. If this was the future, Boehner, a regular yes for more spending on things like defense and the huge Bush-era expansion of Medicare, seemed out of step with it. On paper, Boehner’s conference had 242 Republicans—two dozen more than he needed to win on any given vote. But he often lost twice as many to a group of persuasive and vocal right-wingers led by the likes of Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Allen West of Florida, Raúl Labrador of Idaho, Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Louie Gohmert of Texas.

The newcomers were egged on by right-wing talk radio and a growing chorus of well-funded outside groups like RedState, Freedom Works and Heritage Action that flooded member switchboards with complaints that Boehner was selling them out to Obama. “He sort of ignored them at first and hoped they would go away,” remembers one former GOP leadership aide. “They had the ability to shut people down, and created a competing voice. By the time we took them seriously, we were screwed.”

The first real crisis of Boehner’s speakership came during the 2010 lame-duck session, when the Tea Partyers nearly scuttled a last-minute deal to avoid a government shutdown. In late summer 2011, they noisily rejected Boehner’s attempts to negotiate a long-term extension of the nation’s debt ceiling with Obama. Boehner pleaded with them, to no avail—even though it seemed to be the GOP’s moment of maximum leverage after the 2010 take-back of the House, when a chastened Obama, stunned by the election “shellacking,” had agreed to hundreds of billions of dollars in domestic spending cuts that left liberals howling.

In mid-2011, against the odds, Boehner and Obama plunged into secret negotiations to forge a “grand bargain” to create a sweeping bipartisan agreement on taxes and entitlements and avoid the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration. That proposed deal broke down in spectacular fashion when conservatives, led by Cantor, rebelled. Eventually, Boehner pulled out of the talks, accusing Obama of negotiating in bad faith.

That soured relations with the White House—Obama and Boehner didn’t really talk for the next 18 months. But the mood inside Boehner’s own conference was even more toxic. Boehner told a White House aide that “these stupid bastards have no idea that they just won.” When a last-minute compromise eventually materialized, the deal was negotiated by McConnell and Vice President Joe Biden—and passed the House only after rumors circulated that Standard & Poor’s was about to lower the nation’s credit rating.

Worse still, the fight exposed deep divisions between Boehner and his own No. 2, Cantor—who allied himself with the Tea Party wing during the fight. When an aide asked Boehner to describe Cantor’s role in the fiasco, the speaker conjured the image of a cartoon—with Boehner stuck up a tree and Cantor sawing the limb out from under him. “We realized, at that moment, that we had a big problem,” says a former senior Obama administration official who worked on the deal. “The speaker had good intentions, but he was basically weak.”

By this time, conservatives were now waging open warfare against the speaker for collaborating with the presidential enemy. Cantor felt especially burned: He had been cut out of the talks and kept in the dark, tipped off only by Biden, who was also feeling marginalized, according to former GOP leadership staffers. When Boehner finally got around to presenting the broad outlines of the doomed deal to his own leadership, an exasperated Cantor predicted that a majority of Republicans would vote against it, and a Cantor staffer pointedly asked Boehner, “Are you fucking kidding me?” according to a person who was in the room.

It didn’t get any better. After the 2012 election, talks between Boehner and Obama began anew and stalled again, and the speaker, hoping to force Obama’s hand, tried to pass a bill that would replace sequestration with deep budget cuts while blocking many of the tax increases for the wealthy that Obama had made his 2012 reelection platform. Tea Party conservatives rebelled en masse and forced him to withdraw his bill, the unfortunately named “Plan B,” an hour before a scheduled vote. Again, the Senate led the way, and a measure—hiking tax rates for families earning more than $450,000—was eventually passed on the strength of House Democrats.

The government shutdown and 2014 midterms behind him, Boehner says he is in control of his conference. "They had to have learned something from all of this," he said after the shutdown. | Bryant Avondoglio/Speaker Boehner's Office

Later, in a meeting of House Republicans, a deeply demoralized Boehner led members in a prayer asking for the divine strength to “accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

A member of the conference told me, “It was the lowest I’ve ever seen Boehner. … He just walked away that night, alone, hands in his pockets, head down.”

Ask him about it now, and Boehner maintains he wasn’t angry, just disappointed and motivated to bounce back. The one time in years he really lost his cool, he says, came during the 2012 fiscal cliff talks, an oft-recited tale of him telling Harry Reid to “go fuck yourself!” after the crusty Senate Democratic leader accused him of running a dictatorship in the House. “Nobody on my staff has ever seen me angry,” he tells me, again with a straight face. “My wife maybe, in 41 years, has seen me angry once—maybe. … It doesn’t do any good. You let it go.”

A couple of years ago, Boehner removed a few of the rebels from key committee assignments to punish them, but that was the exception, not the rule. Mostly, he prefers barbs to bullets. When rambunctious Long Island Rep. Peter King accosted Boehner in a Capitol hallway to demand a vote on a stalled Hurricane Sandy relief bill, Boehner fended him off with a curt, “We’re getting to you soon, shithead,” then shot him a quick smile.

***

All of these tussles have frayed Obama’s relationship with Boehner, and none more than the trail of misunderstandings and political miscalculations that led to the government shutdown in the fall of 2013.

Earlier that year, Boehner, this time united with Cantor, had counseled his conference to negotiate a quick deal out of the budget impasse before the government was set to run out of funding October 1. But then Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the Tea Party darling, crossed the Capitol Rotunda to whip up the right wing of Boehner’s conference, demanding that any deal include a quixotic plan to defund Obamacare completely—another rebuff of Boehner, who had said that the health care act, while infuriating to them, should now be considered “the law of the land.”

After a conference call with members that August, Boehner and Cantor had concluded that they didn’t have the votes they needed to bring a bill to the floor—and Boehner chose not to risk his speakership by calling on Pelosi’s Democrats to make up the difference. “We got stampeded,” Boehner said, according to an account of a meeting at his office just after the shutdown ended. “And it wasn’t by 20 or 30 of them. It was like 100 of them. I had some of those reasonable, practical people who said I can’t vote with you. So we got stampeded into a fight we tried to avoid. … These [Tea Party] people are crazy, crazy. … They just want a fight.”

Sixteen days into the resulting shutdown, with polls showing that the public overwhelmingly blamed Republicans for the mess, a last-minute measure eventually passed, again with minimal House input and on the backs of Democratic votes; 144 Republicans, two-thirds of Boehner’s unruly brood, voted to keep the government shuttered even as the crisis ended.

But Boehner was upbeat, and he concluded that his Montessori school managerial style had finally convinced the rebels he had been right all along. “They had to have learned something from all of this,” he said at the post-shutdown meeting. “The fact [is] that they saw their leaders fully engaged in the fight—we tried everything, and they know we tried everything.”

Still, Pelosi, who whipped all 198 of her members to vote to end the shutdown, believes Boehner should have laid his speakership on the line to keep the government open.

Being voted out of power was a body blow, and Boehner took weeks to absorb it. “That was a very hard one for John,” says his friend, Rep. Mike Simpson.

“I don’t even care,” Pelosi responds when I ask her if she was sympathetic to Boehner’s plight. “Is shutting down the United States government less important than keeping our jobs? If that’s the attitude the speaker has, well … none of us should exaggerate our importance around here.”

But other Democrats, including several White House aides I spoke to, think that Boehner might have finally figured out how to coopt his tormentors after failing to assuage or defeat them. “He’s getting more adept at giving them just enough to keep them from giving him trouble,” says one senior administration official. After whip Kevin McCarthy moved up to majority leader when Cantor left, Boehner embraced Steve Scalise, a very conservative Louisianan with deep connections to the Tea Partyers, as his replacement. (And Boehner stood by Scalise after the congressman recently admitted to speaking before a group affiliated with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 2002.) When it came time to introduce a response to Obama’s immigration order, Boehner gave the task to Florida Tea Partyer Ted Yoho, who had voted against him in the 2013 nail-biter of a leadership election; Yoho thanked Boehner by challenging him on this year’s speaker’s ballot.

“All the rock throwers have come to the conclusion that he’s got a really hard job; that’s what the shutdown did for John,” says Mike Rogers of Michigan, a Boehner ally who has ditched the tumultuous House for a talk radio job. “People have often encumbered the speaker, and that’s really hurt us,” Rogers says. “But now I think there’s a decent chance some of these people, especially the new ones, are going to give him the support he needs.”

Boehner will need it this coming year, when he might finally be able to make that bargain with Obama—if only his conference will let him.

And besides, the president and the speaker are a complicated pair. Boehner likes Obama more than he lets on publicly (being too friendly with Obama is a serious occupational hazard), and they both are certifiably golf-crazy, so there’s always something to talk about. During a meeting last fall, they chatted about Boehner’s ailing wrist, and how the injury was keeping him from getting full extension on his backswing. (Out of earshot, the speaker doesn’t think much of the presidential swing, which he has described as “chopping.”) In fact, Obama and Boehner, current and former staffers tell me, talk a lot more often than has been publicly reported. Obama personally called Boehner to say thanks after the spending bill passed in December. Boehner was elated over the deal, and offered praise for White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and George Miller, a liberal California House Democrat who worked its pension provisions.

But there are tensions too: Boehner, the pitchman who values listening, considers Obama too senatorial, a smart guy who lectures. Two former House leadership staffers who spent a lot of time around the speaker say it is not uncommon for Boehner to roll his eyes during one of Obama’s long spiels, set down the receiver on his desk with Obama’s muffled voice still droning over the line—as the speaker lights another Camel or gestures to an aide to hand him a file.

Without skipping a beat, he will pick up the phone just in time to register a standard “uh-huh” or “I’m not sure about that, Mr. President.”

At their tense, obligatory November meeting at the White House after the GOP handed Obama a staggering loss in the midterms, Obama tried to keep his remarks shorter, offering a brief recitation of his priorities for the upcoming lame-duck session. When he was done, he peered across the polished hardwood at the purse-lipped McConnell and said, “Now I’d like to open this up for questions.” Crickets. Then he turned his gaze to Boehner, who offered more dead air.

After an awkward moment, Obama dug into the neat heap of lettuce in front of him, hoisted a laden fork and said, “OK. … So how do you like the salad?” which elicited a chuckle from both leaders, according to a person who was in the room.

When Obama responded to his defeat in the midterms with a hard-turn left and a commitment to using executive actions that rekindled anti-Obama fury on the right, Boehner’s people were quick to complain the White House was “trolling” House Republicans to incite them to do something stupid, like another government shutdown or even impeachment. Still, both Boehner and McConnell have tried to keep rage on the right from spilling into another self-destructive stalemate or an embarrassing overreaction. When a reporter asked Boehner what he thought of a proposal, put forth by a few in his conference, that he refuse to issue Obama the traditional invitation to deliver the State of the Union address, he tweaked the president but didn’t bite. “Listen,” Boehner said, “the more the president talks about his ideas, the more unpopular he becomes. Why would I want to deprive him of that opportunity?”

Still, the idea of a Boehner-Obama bargain late in the game is no idle fantasy, and people close to Boehner say his relationship with the White House is sturdy enough to accommodate a big deal on taxes, entitlements and government spending, trade and immigration. Despite all the negativity in public, neither man has given up on direct negotiation, and White House aides love the speaker because he will tell them candidly what he can and can’t get done (often the latter). In fact, Boehner’s camp responded positively when the White House floated the idea of inviting Boehner and McConnell up to Camp David for a summit intended to reset their relationships after the election, according to two people familiar with the situation. The leaders told the White House the timing conflicted with the schedule of the lame-duck session, but White House officials hope to revive the idea of a three-party meeting sometime in early 2015.

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When you review the past four years of legislative chaos and political combat, it’s impossible not to ask: Is this any way to run a House? Boehner’s people say it was the only way, given the magnitude of the Tea Party backlash and the social media explosion that has made obstructionism a litmus test for GOP House candidates. “Honestly, he did all he could to hold things together,” says Boehner friend and longtime lieutenant Tom Latham.

But getting rolled—or ending your career by passing symbolic bills designed to be vetoed—isn’t exactly a recipe for immortality. “Look, you’ve got to have a vision in order to be a great speaker,” says J.C. Watts, the former Oklahoma congressman who defeated Boehner in that 1998 race for Republican Conference Committee chairman. “On Day One, if you don’t have an endgame and boundaries and a vision, this place will run you crazy. You will never get to where you want to go.”

Boehner, always looking for an opening to make a deal, thinks the GOP capture of the Senate—a body that can’t function without a modicum of bipartisanship—will make cooperation with Democrats the rule rather than the exception, Tea Party be damned. Boehner told me “bipartisanship” was in fact one of his top priorities for 2015, and, in private, in the wake of the 2013 shutdown debacle, Boehner told his inner circle that he has no problems passing big legislation “by working directly with the Democrats” if his own conference defies him again.

So we got stampeded into a fight we tried to avoid,” Boehner said privately just after the shutdown. “These [Tea Party] people are crazy, crazy. … They just want a fight.”

That’s the way it worked in December: Two-thirds of Republicans joined about one-third of Democrats to pass a Boehner government-funding plan that included dubious bipartisan goodies, such as a dramatic loosening of fundraising limits for the party committees that his office negotiated with David Krone, Harry Reid’s Machiavellian chief of staff. It also brought Boehner’s and Obama’s staffs together: The two camps worked “seamlessly” behind the scenes to push the measure through over liberal Democrats’ objections, according to an aide who worked on the deal.

When I asked Boehner if he worried Republicans would slam him for dealing with Democrats, he blew a puff of smoke and answered, “I don’t care.”

The hug-a-Democrat strategy has just as much to do with smart politics as serious policy. Boehner and McConnell want to force House and Senate Democrats to take tough votes that split their ranks—just as Republicans have splintered in recent years—and they succeeded in this as well in December, when Pelosi rebelled against Obama over the budget.

“We’re going to send [Obama] a lot of things he can veto, and then we get to see if the president can hold the Democrats together,” says Boehner’s buddy Richard Burr.

President Obama and Speaker Boehner play golf together at Andrews Air Force Base in 2011. | Larry Downing/Reuters/Corbis

But even before the president issued his immigration order, there wasn’t evidence Boehner’s conference, even with the arrival of a handful of new moderates, has the appetite for heavy legislative lifting—especially as the Hannitys and Levins amp up the pressure.

“Is this Boehner’s majority?” asks Dan Holler of Heritage Action, one of the outside groups Boehner has battled in recent years. “This is not a majority in the House, or the Senate for that matter, that was ushered in by the Republican establishment. This is purely the result of the enthusiasm and the work of an authentic grassroots-based majority in the party—the Tea Party, if you will, not Boehner.”

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On an early December Tuesday, Boehner posed outside his office for his weekly picture-taking session, greeting about 100 Republican campaign staffers there to celebrate the midterms. He tightened his tie between snapshots, as he is prone to do, even though you couldn’t slip a dime between the tidy lavender knot and collar. It’s one of many Boehner tics cataloged and imitated by his friends and staff. Ohio’s junior senator, Rob Portman, an old Boehner ally, does a spot-on version of the tie thing, complete with a ritualistic throat clearing.

When a reporter informed him that a group of conservative members had just pledged to support him in the upcoming vote for speaker, Boehner flashed a quick smile, then checked himself. “Well, I guess we’ll see,” he said.

But his allies have been leaving nothing to chance, furiously whipping “yes” votes to avoid a repeat of that awful January afternoon two years ago, when Boehner, all alone in his little boat, was at the mercy of the waves.