Gleefully Releases Mute Button

Out of Office, Ex-Speaker John Boehner Gleefully Releases Mute Button

By CARL HULSE

John A. Boehner never minced words as House speaker, but he usually leveled his insults behind closed doors. Now a private citizen, Mr. Boehner is going public, and the results can be spectacular.

On Wednesday, the former speaker gleefully unloaded on Senator Ted Cruz before a crowd at Stanford University, colorfully describing the Republican presidential contender from Texas as “Lucifer in the flesh.”

“I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life,” said Mr. Boehner, who has made previous disparaging remarks about Mr. Cruz in both public and private, though without comparing him directly to Satan.

An affronted Mr. Cruz, fighting in Indiana to keep his presidential bid alive, responded that he barely knew Mr. Boehner.

“If I have said 50 words in my life to John Boehner, I’d be surprised, and every one of them has consisted of pleasantries,” Mr. Cruz told reporters, noting that he had never really worked with Mr. Boehner.

And therein lies the problem. Mr. Boehner, who suffered as Mr. Cruz wooed rebellious House conservatives into a punishing government shutdown in 2013, saw Mr. Cruz as a self-aggrandizer who put himself above the institution of Congress and even the good of his party. To an institutionalist like Mr. Boehner, there is no greater offense.

Mr. Cruz, on the other hand, saw Mr. Boehner as a handy symbol of Washington deal-making and the standard-bearer for what Mr. Cruz deplores as the “Washington cartel,” a much more ominous way of describing the political establishment. It was destined to be a nonrelationship forged where Lucifer resides.

While Mr. Boehner no doubt enjoyed the attention accorded his biting remark on Mr. Cruz, it worked out for Mr. Cruz as well. He got the opportunity to again burnish his anti-Washington credentials and position himself as a warrior against Mr. Boehner and Donald J. Trump, who Mr. Boehner said in the Stanford talk was a “texting buddy.” Mr. Boehner said that they had golfed together, and that he would vote for Mr. Trump if it came to that, but not for Mr. Cruz.

To anyone who knew Mr. Boehner in Washington, the comments, first reported by The Stanford Daily, were no surprise. With a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Mr. Boehner would often hold forth, offering his rather spirited views of individuals and ideas, though not always for publication. And when he was in exile from the leadership from 1998 to 2006, he was a go-to quote for commentary on the poor conduct of those who were in charge.

But when he took over as speaker, Mr. Boehner clammed up a bit, so the surprise is how freely flowing the comments are these days.

Earlier this year, Mr. Boehner, who favored Jeb Bush in the presidential race and later endorsed his home-state governor, John Kasich, essentially single-handedly touched off the Paul Ryan-for-Republican-nominee boomlet while speaking to a trade association in March.

“If we don’t have a nominee who can win on the first ballot, I’m for none of the above,” Mr. Boehner said. “They all had a chance to win. None of them won. So I’m for none of the above. I’m for Paul Ryan to be our nominee.”

Mr. Ryan, Mr. Boehner’s successor as speaker, has been trying to dial back that talk ever since, another victim of John Boehner unplugged.

To his aides, this is all just Boehner being Boehner.

“You know he generally says what he thinks anyway, and being out of office has certainly not made him any less inclined to be that way,” said David Schnittger, a spokesman for the former speaker.

The Stanford speech was a good example. Encouraged to be candid, he was downright loquacious in offering his views on everything from Hillary Clinton — “Oh, I’m a woman, vote for me” — to Senator Bernie Sanders’s being a good guy to the possibility of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. emerging as a last-minute presidential nominee.

He pronounced the conservative Republicans in the Freedom Caucus who bedeviled him on Capitol Hill as knuckleheads and goofballs, a sentiment he has also expressed on prior occasions.

Mr. Boehner had little patience for conservatives he believed did not understand how the House worked and how compromise was a necessity, not a sin, with a Democrat in the White House and Democrats empowered in the Senate.

Mr. Ryan, by contrast, has been more willing to reach out to the same conservatives. And while the results may be similar — a continuing budget standoff for instance — the conservatives do not have their sights set on Mr. Ryan, as they did Mr. Boehner. At least not yet.

Mr. Boehner seems eminently comfortable in retirement, buying a new car after years of being driven around by a security team and traveling the country without the trappings of his congressional position.

“I think my proudest accomplishment is walking out of there the same jackass I was 25 years before,” Mr. Boehner said, according to the Stanford newspaper.

Now that he is out of office, the speaker speaks.