READING, Ohio — John A. Boehner, the House Republican leader, laments that the America he grew up in has been “snuffed out” by Democrats. Yet Mr. Boehner’s hometown seems virtually untouched by the decades that have passed since he lugged kegs of beer around his father’s bar, tossed a Friday night football and frightened a driving instructor by burning rubber in a GTO.
The same Cape Cod houses dot the roadsides, among a smattering of family businesses. On the hill where Mr. Boehner grew up with 11 siblings, there are remnants of the fence that kept cows at bay. Mr. Boehner’s sister tends the bar his family ran through much of the last century.
With Republicans increasingly confident that they will capture the House in November, Mr. Boehner stands likely to become speaker and to lead his party’s effort to turn the nation in a new direction after two years under President Obama and the Democrats. It seems that almost everything about him stems from this spot at the southern tip of Ohio.
It defined his political viewpoints, shaped by his working-class Roman Catholic family. It formed his passions (golf, football, more golf), kindled his love of sharp clothes (and his caustic commentary about others’ wardrobes) and presaged his political trajectory, one influenced by his experience as a businessman and largely ignited by a lobbyist who became his patron and the first of many lobbyist-friends in his orbit.
Mr. Boehner — now Mr. Obama’s Gucci punching bag — has by his own account and those of people who know him remained as unchanged as Reading, just outside Cincinnati. “He’s been conservative, he’s been consistent and he’s been tan,” said Bob Hagan, an Ohio state representative who served with Mr. Boehner (pronounced BAY-ner) in the Statehouse in the late 1980s.
For Republicans who hope to recapture the House, the challenge is to shift the focus from Mr. Boehner’s country club image and tangerine hue back to his Midwestern conservative résumé, which they hope will attract a frustrated electorate.
But the effort by Democrats to portray Mr. Boehner, 60, as lazy and retrograde — speak loudly and carry a large cocktail — is equally arduous. He is a man who paws through large briefing books for committee meetings, Democrats who have worked with him acknowledge. He can foil challengers with his charm, as his opponents in his first Congressional race found out. He is surprisingly emotional, given to occasional waterworks during House speeches or three-hanky stops among supporters on the campaign trail.
Mr. Boehner explains his rise from a childhood with little money to the Congressional leadership by recalling his ambition to improve his life.
“I was determined, I was miserable and I didn’t have anything,” he said in a recent interview in his Capitol Hill office, as he pulled on a series of Camel cigarettes (filtered). “I was trying to make something out of nothing.”
Mr. Boehner’s parents were Democrats, and politics did not define his upbringing, nor even really infuse it. “We were lucky to know who the president was,” said George Luning, a high school classmate of the congressman. “His dad owned a bar, and I think being around older people who had their opinions about this or that all day made it so when he got home, he didn’t much want to talk about that stuff.”
The culture wars that would later define the Republican Party were also far from the minds of the boys of Reading. “There just weren’t as many issues then,” said Jerry Vanden Eyden, Mr. Boehner’s closest childhood friend. “You didn’t know anything about gays, you didn’t know anything about abortion, you didn’t know anything about a lot of the social issues they got today,” he said. “We didn’t hear about it, didn’t worry about it, didn’t talk about it, didn’t think about it.”
It was work, and taxes, that politicized Mr. Boehner.
“Growing up, we were probably Kennedy Catholics because we were a strong devout Catholic family,” said Bob Boehner, the congressman’s older brother, who like all his siblings eventually switched party allegiance. “But the first time you get a real job and get your paycheck, you look down and you wonder, where’s the rest of your money, and they explain to you that that’s the tax you have to pay to the government, you start thinking more and more about becoming a Republican."
Jennifer Steinhauer reported from Reading, Ohio, and Carl Hulse from Washington. Eric Lipton contributed reporting from Washington.
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