Bloomfield Profiles Cantor and His Leadership of Hard-Line Conservatives

Jason Attermann — August 5, 2011 – 10:05 am | Republicans Comments (1) Add a comment

Douglas M. Bloomfield, a veteran Jewish journalist and “political insider” for The Jewish Week, profiled House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) in The Jerusalem Post and examined his leadership “of the more ideological hardliners and Tea Partiers” within the House Republican caucus. Bloomfield noted the apparent distance between Cantor and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) as well as his close associations with the far right elements of the GOP.

Bloomfield wrote:

Howard Fineman, a veteran political analyst, said at the height of the debt limit crisis, ‘Cantor has spent months undercutting Boehner.’...

Confused loyalties appear to be a problem for Cantor, according to many Capitol Hill denizens. Boehner, 61, has his base in the old guard, and Cantor, 48, is a leader of the more ideological hardliners and Tea Partiers. These would seem like complementary qualities for the leadership, but instead the two men are seen more often as rivals.

At several critical points during the debt crisis, Cantor seemed not only out of synch with the speaker, but to be deliberately weakening him….

While trying to cut a deal with the White House, Boehner found his deputy, Cantor, ‘openly distancing himself from, and positioning himself to the right of, his boss Boehner - a maneuver that struck some as odd, some as shifty and others as downright treacherous,’ John Hellemann reported in New York magazine.

Under Cantor’s prodding, Republicans rejected any compromise and could barely pass their own draconian bill, which was dead on arrival in the Senate….

Boehner had been close to a deal earlier, but Cantor walked out on negotiations with the vice president, dissed the president in another White House meeting and pressed Boehner to pull back from a deal that included some revenue enhancement. An aide said Cantor was just being ‘a passionate advocate’ for his views; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called him ‘childish.’

Cantor showed Boehner who has more clout in the Republican caucus, and that has to make the speaker nervous about keeping his job.

Cantor’s leadership of the GOP’s extremist wing during the debt ceiling negotiations demonstrates the large differences separating Cantor from the vast majority of American Jews. By choosing to fight for the interests of the Tea Party and hard-line conservatives, he further confirmed that he cannot be trusted to represent the values of most members of the American Jewish community.

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