Boehner ready to compromise, but will GOP?

WASHINGTON

After Mitt Romney's defeat on Tuesday, John Boehner is the undisputed leader of the Republican Party.

Pity him.

President Obama's reelection and the Democrats' successful defense of their Senate majority have put the House speaker in a vise. Squeezing him on one side are the "tea party" conservatives and their ilk, dominant in the House Republican majority, who say Romney lost because he was too accommodating and moderate. Squeezing him on the other side is a Democratic president who campaigned for the rich to pay a higher share of taxes.

Boehner's first instinct on Tuesday night was to side with his House firebrands.

"While others chose inaction," he said at a Republican National Committee event, "we offered solutions." Americans, he said, "responded by renewing our House Republican majority. With this vote, the American people have also made clear that there's no mandate for raising tax rates."

After sleeping on it, Boehner appeared at the Capitol on Wednesday and offered a dramatically different message: He proposed, albeit in a noncommittal way, putting tax increases on the table.

"Mr. President, this is your moment," he said into the cameras, reading, sometimes with difficulty, from a teleprompter. "We're ready to be led, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans. … We want you to succeed. Let's challenge ourselves to find the common ground that has eluded us."

Boehner left himself sufficient wiggle room, saying, "We're willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions" -- which keeps alive the possibility that the revenue would come only from economic growth (the old Republican position) and not from a higher tax burden.

Still, Boehner's new tone was starkly different from the one set two years ago by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who declared that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." McConnell continued that approach after Tuesday's election, saying, "The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the president's first term."

But the voters denied McConnell his top priority.

And exit polls Tuesday showed that a majority of them favored higher taxes on income over $250,000, as Obama has proposed -- something Boehner's Democratic counterpart in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made sure to point out in a news conference before the speaker's appearance.

The voters, Reid said, "want a balanced approach … and taxes are a part of that."

But Boehner's talk of common ground is likely to enrage the no-compromise wing of his House Republicans, who live in fear of the tea party, Grover Norquist, the Club for Growth and other enforcers of conservative orthodoxy. And tea-party leaders have convinced themselves that Romney lost because he wasn't conservative enough. The Tea Party Patriots, for example, attributed Romney's defeat to his being a "weak moderate candidate, handpicked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment."

More likely, the tea party itself bears the blame for Romney's loss -- just as losses by far-right candidates kept Republicans from taking over the Senate.

To survive conservative primary challenges from Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and others, Romney had to take positions that ultimately doomed him in the general election.

His tough-on-immigration stance, in particular, helps explain his loss of more than 70percent of the Latino vote, which sealed his defeat.

Boehner knows this, of course, and that is why he was so careful when he made his remarks Wednesday afternoon, taking the rare precaution of using a teleprompter.

He left without answering questions, and when reporters shouted queries at him, he only smiled.

"The American people have spoken," Boehner said somberly, his eyes glistening. "If there's a mandate in yesterday's results, it's a mandate for us to find a way to work together."

Although he was vague about what he was offering, his bargaining position was very different from 18 months ago, when he went to the Economic Club of New York and pronounced tax increases "off the table."

This time, he outlined the general framework of a grand bargain: "In order to garner Republican support for new revenue, the president must be willing to reduce spending and shore up entitlement programs."

Boehner chose to make his post-election speech in the Capitol's Rayburn Room, named for Sam Rayburn, the late House speaker who is credited with saying: "Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one."

Boehner sounds as though he's ready to pick up hammer and nail. But will his fellow Republicans stop kicking?

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House speaker ready to drop stalled transport bill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, signaling a lack of Republican support for a stalled $260 billion transportation bill, said on Thursday he was ready to pursue a less ambitious version under consideration by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

A day after imploring House Republicans to end their deep divisions over the five-year measure to rebuild roads, bridges and railways, Boehner moved a step closer to giving up on the troubled House bill altogether.

"The current plan is to see what the Senate can produce and to bring their bill up," Boehner told a news conference. "In the meantime we're going to continue to have conversations with members about a longer-term approach, which most of our members want. But at this point in time, the plan is to bring up the Senate bill or something like it."

Being forced to take up the Senate bill would be another potential setback for Boehner, who has repeatedly struggled to whip up support among conservative Republicans on spending bills. He also has castigated the Senate for failing to consider jobs bills passed by the lower chamber.

The shift to a Senate bill also means Boehner would have to sell House Republicans on a two-year, $109 billion measure that will not contain several provisions they favor.

The Senate on Thursday rejected an amendment that would approve TransCanada Corp's Keystone XL pipeline project from Canada to Texas.

The House version has faced difficulties from the start, alienating fiscally conservative Republicans over its price tag while Democrats and some Republicans have opposed a provision that would end dedicated funding for mass transit projects.

But House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica said he was not giving up on the measure, and that his staff was working with the Boehner and other Republican leaders to try to marshal sufficient votes for passage.

Time is running short, however, as current funding for road and rail construction projects expires on March 31. As many as 1.8 million construction workers would face layoffs if a new measure is not signed into law by then, Democrats say.

"We're not going to let March 31 go by and experience any kind of a shutdown. That is not an option under consideration," Mica said, adding that one possibility was a temporary extension.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan; editing by Vicki Allen and Mohammad Zargham)

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GOP Candidates Are Ready for a National Conversation on Race (The Atlantic Wire)

In March of 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama gave a widely-praised speech calling for a national conversation on race. A little more than two years later, that conversation had only gotten "dumber," Politico's Ben Smith wrote, with Fox News constantly airing images of "new Black Panthers" and MSNBC hunting for racists in the Tea Party. But now it seems the Republican presidential field is ready to renew that dialogue. Newt Gingrich told Maryland Republicans Thursday night that, "No administration in modern times has failed younger blacks more than the Obama administration." But the Republican candidates are still finding their footing when it comes to race, occasionally saying something kind of... weird. Gingrich noted, "I will bet you there is not a single precinct in this state in which the majority will pick for their children food stamps over paychecks." Was there ever any doubt of that?

Related: First GOP Debate with Recognizable Candidates Will Be on June 13

Gingrich--who has a long history of talking about racial issues--has called Obama the "food stamp president" (he would be the "paycheck president"). But he isn't the only 2012 contender to say it's time to go after the black vote. At the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans last weekend, Michele Bachmann pointed to high unemployment rates among blacks and Latinos and said, "This president has failed the Hispanic community. He has failed the African-American community." Bachmann managed to avoid sounding tone deaf, unlike some of her 2012 rivals.

Related: GOP Debate Preview: Hey, We're Not So Bad

Rick Santorum has focused less on economic issues than social ones in his flirtation with minority voters--which makes sense, given that black voters are generally more socially conservative than the rest of the Democratic Party. But he got into trouble making his case on abortion. "I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'No, we're going to decide who are people and who are not people,'" Santorum said, referring to the Three-Fifths Compromise, which said slaves counted as 60 percent of a person in awarding states seats in Congress.

Related: The GOP Presidential Field Keeps an Even Lower Profile

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, currently enjoying a lot of buzz and he considers getting into the 2012 race, appeared to have a tin ear Thursday night at a national conference for Latino government officials in San Antonio. The Associated Press' Chris Tomlinson reports that Perry got a very tepid response from the audience during his speech, with this being the biggest cringe moment:

But a joke about how perfect it was to appoint Jose Cuevas to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission because his name sounds like Jose Cuervo--a brand of tequila--fell flat. Perry struggled to regain his confidence as he described Texas as a land of opportunity.

Slate's Dave Weigel observes that Herman Cain causes some reporters to stutter stupidly when trying to ask him about race. Still, his comments about being a black Republican occasionally raise eyebrows. He likes to say his his poll numbers show the Tea Party isn't racist. He says he's okay with being the "black Mike Huckabee." He says Jon Stewart makes fun of him because he's black. And, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, he seemed to say he was more authentically black than Obama: "Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America," Cain said. "And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a black man in America. ... Barack Obama is more of an international."

Related: 15 Months from the Convention, Here's Your Republican Field

Disaffected Republican speechwriter David Frum says Republicans aren't wrong to try to appeal to minority voters. He writes that Gingrich is "making sense... when he asserts that the social catastrophe creates a political opportunity for a party that can bring forward practical ideas to revive economic growth." But Frum says Gingrich falters when he fails to realize that non-Republicans--especially minorities--don't hate Obama as much as Republicans do.

"Given that minority voters in particular do not blame Obama for the bad economy--in fact, continue to respect and admire him--the mood of raging Republican contempt for the president almost guarantees that we will speak about him in ways that deny us any audience for our policy message."

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