George Packer Quotes
Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.
Packer, George. "Boehner's Fall." The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 2015.
Those who did were ostracized by Delay (who was then the Republican Majority Leader) and some other leading Republicans. His extreme and sometimes illegal partisan tactics got him into criminal difficulty and he was a major part of the great Republican Scandal of 2005-2006. He then was convicted of criminal activity for his extreme and illegal political activities.
The historian was comparing Obama to other historical presidents who either had a majority of both Houses of Congress or had an opposition party that was generally quite cooperative and willing to compromise for the sake of running the country smoothly. At this point in time there was a Tea Party wing of the Republican that was particularly negative and obstructionist. They tended to threaten and intimidate the main stream Republicans who used the filibuster to block legislation the majority of Senators had voted for more times than all the other Congresses in American history. And that was only in Obamas first 6 years.
The Tea Party Republican faction was opposed to government doing much of anything other than Defense and Foreign Policy. The regular Republicans saw a much more extensive and robust role of government though few did so to the same extent as Abraham Lincoln and the other founders of the Republican Party, and Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower the Republicans following in the Alexander Hamilton tradition.
George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of America from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His latest book Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century was released in May 2019.
