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Of course, the most compelling explanation for the president’s animus toward the House majority leader is also the simplest: No one in Washington has done more to disrupt Obama’s first term—and threaten his chance at a second—than Cantor. The two men have clashed from the start. It was only three days after Obama’s inauguration that Cantor came to a White House meeting on the economic crisis and proceeded to hand out copies of the Republican plan to fix it—which Obama quickly dismissed. “Elections have consequences,” the president reportedly told Cantor, “and, Eric, I won.” A month later, at a White House fiscal-responsibility summit, Obama pledged to continue reaching out to Republicans because he was “a glutton for punishment” and then singled out the Virginia congressman for particular opprobrium: “I’m going to keep on talking to Eric Cantor. Some day, sooner or later, he’s going to say, ‘Boy, Obama had a good idea.’ ”
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Having sufficiently cleansed himself of past sins, Cantor, with his finely tuned political radar, then picked up on—and, in turn, helped initiate—what has become the Republican Party’s most profound cultural shift: its belligerent intransigence. Cantor, as one prominent Republican told me, “is not a tea-party guy. He’s a business guy, a business Republican.” But he has managed to successfully elide this difference and, perhaps more than any other Republican in Congress, has politically positioned himself to take advantage of the GOP’s new obstructionist ethos. “Cantor comes from the more contemporary (Republican) school that says cooperation is a dirty word and compromise is an unpardonable sin,” says Obama adviser David Axelrod. “I think he’s a very ambitious guy who’s reading the direction of the Republican Party, and he’s trying to ride that wave.”
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As for those ideologically opposed to Cantor, they dislike him with an intensity that surpasses the usual partisanship—they accuse him of acting in bad faith. Some recall an episode from this past January, when, in a supposed gesture of bipartisanship, Cantor invited Nancy Pelosi to sit with him at the State of the Union. The problem was, he offered the invitation less than 24 hours before the speech, and through reporters. Pelosi had already arranged to sit with another Republican, and when she turned down Cantor’s invite, it led to headlines like “Pelosi Spurns Cantor on Seating.” Others remember how, after repeatedly rejecting Democratic congressman Steny Hoyer’s efforts to work on health-care-reform legislation, Cantor approached Hoyer for a meeting mere weeks before House Democrats were set to bring their bill to the floor—and then, after presenting Hoyer with a set of proposals like tort reform and “association health plans” that had long been anathema to Democrats, complained to reporters that Hoyer had rebuffed his efforts at bipartisanship. “It was unbelievable that he’d conduct himself in such a transparent way to set up a press story,” says one senior Democratic aide.
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But it would be a mistake to assume that Cantor wants to be speaker at any cost—or even any time soon. Although he’s clearly ambitious, Cantor has also repeatedly displayed a cautious streak over the years. Several times during his congressional career, he’s been urged to mount a challenge against the person above him on the leadership ladder—first Roy Blunt, now Boehner. Each time he’s taken a pass, surely realizing that, in internal House politics, attempted coups usually end in murder-suicides. “Nine times out of ten, Cantor will choose to outwork somebody rather than knife him,” says one Republican congressman.
http://nymag.com/news/politics/eric-cantor-2011-10/
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