Posts Tagged ‘Bob Michel’
September 7th, 2011 by John Feehery
Ev and Gerry started the whole response thing.
Everett Dirksen and Gerry Ford, the former Senate Republican leader from Illinois and the former House Minority Leader (and later President) from Michigan used to have a radio show broadcast from the Capitol.
They turned that radio show into a televised rebuttal to President Johnson’s 1966 State of the Union Address.
Dirksen, with his mop of white hair, and Ford, with his bald pate, must have been quite a sight in the years leading up to the Age of Aquarius. Dirksen was the one who famously said, “a billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.”
I could understand the frustration of the two Republican (and minority) leaders. Lyndon Johnson wasn’t much to tell the truth, and Republicans at the start of 1966 didn’t have any legislative power. Dirksen, a genius when it came to the political communication innovation, probably dreamed up the idea of a joint response, and a new idea was born: Let’s tell our side of the story. Read more...
Tags: Age of Aquarius, America, Ames Straw poll, assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bob Livingston, Bob McDonnell, Bob Michel, Bobby Jindal, Congress, Denny Hastert, Dick Armey, Everett Dirksen, Gerry Ford, GOP, Government, House Republicans, Jennifer Dunn, Jim Wright, John Boehner, Lyndon Johnson, Michele Bachmann, Mike Mansfield, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, NFL, Obama, Paul Ryan, Politics, President Johnson’s 1966 State of the Union Address, President Obama, Presidential election, Republican, Richard Nixon, Robert Byrd, Ronald Reagan, Senate Republican leader from Illinois, spending, Steve Largent, White House
Posted in Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, History, Politics, Theory, election, speeches | No Comments »
July 27th, 2011 by John Feehery
John Boehner is doing an exceptional job as Speaker under extraordinarily tough times.
When I first started working in Congress, Tom Foley had just taken over from Jim Wright as Speaker of the House. Unlike the dictatorial Wright, Foley ran a decentralized process that gave too much power to Committee barons like Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Brooks and John Dingell.
Foley could never quite get the Chairmen to work together enough to overcome their jurisdictional squabbles, and Democrats faltered under the House Bank scandal, the Post Office debacle and a series of other damaging revelations about a Congress that was out of control.
When Newt Gingrich came to the Speaker’s Office, he leap-frogged over the gentlemanly Bob Michel (my former boss) who unfortunately announced his retirement before he could see the promised land of a Republican majority. Gingrich learned the lessons of the ineffective Foley, centralized power in his chambers, and bull-rushed an ambitious Contract with America legislative agenda. Along the way, Gingrich alienated some of the new Freshmen, his committee Chairmen, and some key members of the leadership, so much so that a few of them launched a failed coup against the embattled Speaker. Read more...
Tags: America, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bob Michel, Congress, Conservatives, Dan Rostenkowski, Democrats, Denny Hastert, Dick Armey, George Bush, GOP, Government, Grand Bargain, House Republicans, Jack Brooks, Jim Wright, John Boehner, John Dingell, Mark Foley scandal, Nancy Pelosi, Newt Gingrich, President Obama, Republican, Republican Conference, Republicans, Speaker of the House, spending, taxes, Tea Party, the Iraq War, Tom DeLay, Tom Foley, White House
Posted in Bailouts, Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, History, Media, Politics, Promises, Reviews, Scandals, Theory, election, speeches, spending, taxes, war | No Comments »
June 16th, 2011 by John Feehery
First, there was the beer summit. Now there is the golf summit.
Where other Presidents had summits to negotiate nuclear arms deals or budget compromises, Barack Obama has chosen to meet his opponents in a more relaxed setting.
The beer summit, for those who don’t recall, was an effort to bring a white cop and a black professor together, after they had a major misunderstanding that led to racial indigestion. Obama made the situation worse by calling the cop stupid, and then he had to calm the waters over a few choice beverages.
The President likes to include Joe Biden in all of his summits, so he has invited the Vice President over to play golf with him and with Speaker of the House John Boehner at an undisclosed location (probably Andrews Air Force base).
Boehner has decided to bring John Kasich, the Ohio Governor, to play with him. My guess is that Kasich and Biden will do all the talking, while Boehner and Obama will do all the smoking. Read more...
Tags: America, Andrews Air Force base, Barack Obama, beer summit, Bill Clinton, Bob Michel, Bull Moose Party, Democrats, Don Van Natta, election, golf summit, Joe Biden, John Boehner, John Kasich, Lyndon Johnson, Republicans, Richard Nixon, Tip O’Neill, William Howard Taft
Posted in Fun, Government, History, Politics, Presidential election, Theory, election, sports | No Comments »
May 11th, 2011 by John Feehery
I first met Newt Gingrich in 1989. As an intern for House Minority Leader Bob Michel, my short-term task was to deliver Newt his lunch as he was meeting with a Michel staffer. The lunch consisted of a fruit plate. Newt was trying to lose weight, and apparently the fruit plate was a tactic in his strategy to achieve his vision of a slim, svelte Gingrich.
While he never achieved that vision, Newt has done pretty well for himself. An army brat with a funny name, Gingrich transformed Congressional politics forever, and established an international brand in the process.
Newt is now trying to turn that brand into presidential timber. The problem for him is that his brand might just be too big for a presidential campaign.
Gingrich’s tenure as Speaker was the most aggressive since Henry Clay. Like Clay, Newt wasn’t content to run the House. He wanted to run the country, and in many ways, he succeeded.
Newt’s bombast suggests a right-wing conservative, but his actual ideology is much more activist in its roots. Like Clay, who promoted a national system of roads and canals in the mid-19th century, Gingrich is a T and I guy. As a former member of the Transportation Committee, Newt believes strongly in the power of concrete to transform a nation. Read more...
Tags: Bob Michel, Congress, Henry Clay, National Institute of Health, Newt Gingrich, NIH, Obama, Presidential election, Transportation Committee, Vietnam War
Posted in GOP, Government, History, Media, Politics, Presidential election, Theory, election | No Comments »
April 8th, 2011 by John Feehery
I first got a chance to meet John Boehner when he came to the Congress in 1991. He entered the Congress with a bang, teaming up with the so-called “Gang of 7”, new Republican members who had enough of the rot that then permeated the institution.
I worked for Bob Michel back then, and Michel was the establishment. Boehner was trying to shake up the establishment. Now, Boehner is the establishment, and a bunch of new Tea Party members are trying to do the same things to Boehner that he tried to do to Michel.
Boehner was a rabble-rouser, but he was also a team player, and when Bill Clinton became President in 1993, Boehner joined the Theme Team, a Michel creation that used one-minute speeches to counter the Clinton message machine.
After Republicans took over in 1995, Boehner leaped to the Republican leadership after serving only two terms in the House (which back then was pretty amazing), where he got a chance to run the Conference message machine. Boehner saw first-hand what happens when the government shuts down. He supported the revolutionary class of 1994, the original Tea Party movement, when they wanted a government shutdown. Read more...
Tags: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Bob Michel, Congress, Conservatives, Democrats, dollar, Economy, election, GOP, Government, John Boehner, Media, Newt Gingrich, Obama, Politics, Presidential election, Republican, Republicans, spending, taxes, Tea Party
Posted in Bad Decisions, Economy, Financial Crisis, GOP, Government, History, Politics, Presidential election, Theory, speeches, spending, taxes | 1 Comment »
March 2nd, 2011 by John Feehery
Bob Michel
I spent 20 minutes trying to find my cell phone this morning, which made me 20 minutes late for a birthday breakfast honoring my old boss, Bob Michel, the former House minority leader.
There was an upside to being a little late though, because I was able to hear a nice tribute to Bob on XM/Sirius radio. Tim Farley saluted Michel on his birthday and played a clip from his response to Bill Clinton’s State of the Union Address in 1993.
Michel’s tough response to Clinton set the tone for a long two years for the new President. Michel doesn’t get enough credit for organizing the opposition to the Clinton agenda. He stopped Hillary-care in its tracks, mostly by coming up with an alternative that scared the Democrats because it would have won on the House floor. He organized his members into a “Theme Team”, which helped slow down Clinton’s “stimulus” plan. He worked well with Bob Dole and the governors.
Bob was a master legislative strategist, which is why he was the longest serving Republican leader in the history of the House. It was Michel’s legislative acumen that helped Ronald Reagan enact his economic program in the early 80’s. Read more...
Tags: Bill Clinton, Bob Michel, clinton, Democrats, election, Government, health care, Hillary-care, John Boehner, Politics, Republican, Republicans, White House
Posted in Government, History, Politics, health care, speeches, war | No Comments »
June 17th, 2008 by John Feehery
This orginally appeared in The Politico
In 1989, when I started working for then-House Minority Leader Bob Michel, I was full of ideological enthusiasm. Fresh off of reading “The Fountainhead” and listening to Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC tapes, I was, in my mind, a fire-breathing conservative who became a bitter critic of George Bush the First and his Big Government ideas. I thought of myself as the most conservative member of the Michel leadership staff. Some thought I was a right-wing wacko.
After I had worked for five years for Michel, a war hero and one of the best leaders in congressional history, he announced his retirement. I decided to go back home to Illinois, where I worked for Denny Hastert, a loyal lieutenant of Michel. Hastert curiously became the campaign manager of Tom DeLay, a bitter critic of Michel who was running for Republican whip.
DeLay, with Hastert’s considerable help, won the whip race as Republicans captured the House for the first time in 40 years. I moved back to Washington to work for then-Majority Whip DeLay and Hastert, his chief deputy. I eventually became DeLay’s communications director. Read more...
Tags: Bob Michel, Conservatives, Moderates, Republicans, Tom DeLay
Posted in Theory | 1 Comment »
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