John Boehner's job proved impossible, at least by the arduous manner in which he felt it necessary to attempt it.
The conventionally conservative House speaker struggled to negotiate the extreme conservative environment that erupted around him with the Tea Party insurgency beginning in 2010.
Boehner found it advisable to pander to his fringe-infested caucus by mouthing obligingly fiery rhetoric about turning the out-of-control government on its head with conservative purity.
Simultaneously, he felt a need to work in traditional deal-maker style with establishment powers--business lobbyists and Democratic leaders--to achieve accommodations that accepted political reality and kept government working as smoothly as possible, indeed even open.
Boehner wanted to settle for the biggest incremental gains in conservative philosophy that reasonable negotiation would allow. His actual views on issues weren't a great deal less conservative than those of the Tea Party contingent. He simply was much more pragmatic, realistic and respectful of the process.
Molly Ball of The Atlantic wrote over the weekend that an aide to Nancy Pelosi told her that Boehner's speakership had been about two things. One was making the deal. The other was never having enough votes from his own caucus to deliver the deal.
It all served to wear him out, as could be illustrated by any of several anecdotes, my favorite of which is the predicament Boehner found himself in in 2013 on the wholly contrived issue of applying Obamacare to congressional staff members.
Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley inserted a line in the Affordable Care Act saying congressional employees would be put into Obamacare to deal with the new program just as regular people had to deal with it.
Grassley later said he hadn't actually intended to provide that his own staff members, and all congressional staff members, would have to give up their job-based health insurance with its sizable employer contribution and enter the health-care exchanges where they wouldn't qualify for subsidies.
But that was the effect. It meant congressional staff members would be the only recipients of employer-provided health insurance in the country to be thrust forcibly off that coverage. It would amount to a significant salary reduction and a devaluing of the job of those who toil in the offices of Congress.
Members of Boehner's right flank went home and assured their Tea Party constituents that they had made darned sure Congress would be forced to play by the same horrible Obamacare rules as everyone. They referred to the standard employer contribution as a government subsidy, and they crowed that the subsidy's days were ended.
Boehner found it necessary to regurgitate that rhetoric. He bellowed that Congress should and would live by the disaster it had foisted on the people.
But privately the speaker deemed it outrageous that his and his colleagues' valued employees would be punished uniquely, unreasonably and unfairly by losing the employer-based health contribution and employer contribution that private employees similarly remunerated were being allowed to keep under Obamacare.
Reasonable Republican House members, concerned for their employees, wanted Boehner to fix it.
So this is what got revealed: While Boehner was spouting the Tea Party cant, his chief of staff was engaged in a frenzied email conversation with Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid's chief of staff about working out a solution to this unfairness that Boehner was only rhetorically endorsing.
At one point Boehner's chief of staff recommended that Boehner and Reid arrange a meeting with President Barack Obama, but advertise the meeting as having to do with some other bogus subject so that no one would know what Boehner was up to.
Offended by the hypocrisy, Reid's chief of staff leaked the emails to the press.
Boehner got caught in red-handed execution of his essence, which was double-dealing.
And, by the way, Obama finagled a way to let congressional employees keep a reasonable facsimile of their employer contribution as they ventured into the exchange.
And the Tea Party berated the no-account president, of course.
So what we have here is a continuation of the trend line of American politics: Conservative is now considered moderate. Only destructive extremism is deemed conservative.
A conservative like Boehner becomes a mushy moderate if he sees no sense in mindless destruction or shutting down the government over something you can't win.
Boehner started out as a fully credentialed conservative and Newt Gingrich lieutenant, a back-bencher rising against the mild minority leadership at the time and helping design the Contract with America in 1994.
Now he leaves as a beleaguered moderate, a dreaded deal-maker, a guy who won't go to the mat.
A pragmatic conservative congressional insider and realist looked up one day and saw Donald Trump and Ben Carson as the leading presidential candidates of his party.
Surely he wondered what the point of all his struggles was.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/29/2015