Boehner was No. 4 in the House Republican hierarchy in 1998 when then-Speaker Newt Gingrich resigned because of low public approval ratings and a coup within his own party. The resignation pushed Boehner out of the leadership.

“Instead of sulking, he got to work and became a pretty effective legislator, showing that he could work well across the aisle,” said Robert Maranto, a University of Arkansas political scientist.

But Boehner's kind of effectiveness pulls few punches.

“When I got into this business, I thought what this business needs is somebody who ought to just say it the way it is,” Boehner says, adding that his candor sometimes makes his staff nervous.

Former aide Elmendorf recalls Gephardt’s toughest time occurred after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 when he was under pressure from within his party because of his cooperation with President Bush on Iraq.

“In a lot of ways Boehner is in the same position. The country is in serious trouble economically. The country is going to expect some cooperation from the Republican Party,” Elmendorf says.

Boehner stresses that the key tenets of the Republican Party are economic freedom and strong national security. He is as critical of the Obama administration’s handling of national security as he is of its spending.

“I don’t know what their plan is. When I see them make what I think was a political decision to close Gitmo without an overarching strategy or plan to deal with those who had been (detained) there, it scares me to death.”

Boehner is concerned by the release of the Justice Department memos prepared by the Bush administration that provided the legal justification for harsh interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency in questioning terror suspects. He said the Obama administration's decision to release the documents will have a chilling effect on agency operatives.

“That is not a good position for our country to be in, when our professionals are concerned about whether they can do their job the way it needs to be done,” he says.

He notes both Dennis Blair, Obama’s director of national intelligence, and CIA Director Leon Panetta complained that publication of the memos would be harmful to the spy agency.

Boehner sees no bipartisanship from the Obama administration or Democrats on Capitol Hill. “There is absolutely no reaching out at any level. Sure, the president asked us for our ideas. We gave them to him, and they promptly ignored them.”

“It’s been like sitting in front of a machine gun with it being pointed at you,” Boehner says.

That may be no surprise.

“The majority party runs the show, and that’s increasingly been done with little or no input from the minority,” says Texas Tech political scientist Tom Nokken.

Nokken considers the minority leader position a sort of speaker-in-waiting, “Lacking any sort of institutional heft, he is the public face trying to gain support for the minority party’s opposition to the agenda and policy positions of the majority.”

That is exactly what Boehner is trying to do: convince America that the Republican path is better than the one chosen by Democrats.

He looks around his freshly painted office, the walls gold as opposed to the dark blue favored by the previous occupant, Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is majority leader.

“There is a lot of history in this room. Sam Rayburn built this wing. Tip O’Neill, Jim Wright, Tom Foley, they have all had this office,” Boehner says, listing a Who's Who of American politics.

So, what's next?

“I want Nancy Pelosi’s job -- period,” he says.