The most arresting moment came when Boehner told Stahl he can no longer make visits to schools, or even look at the little kids on the playground, because he immediately starts crying.  That had me alarmed. I thought there was going to be some terrible story about an ailing child that would then force me to have warm and sympathetic thoughts about John Boehner.  But no. The reason, Boehner finally choked out, was because “making sure these kids have a shot at the American dream, like I did, is important.”  We will stop again briefly to imagine what would have happened if Nancy Pelosi, upon being elected speaker, had confessed on national TV that she was unable to visit schools in her district because the sight of little children made her break into sobs.  O.K. About Boehner. Many of us first noticed his tendency toward tears when he appeared on election night to celebrate his party’s taking control of the House. He had hardly gotten in front of the microphone before things got watery.  “I spent my whole life chasing (sob) the American dream,” he told the cameras. “Put myself through school, working every rotten job there was ...”  The American Dream has had such a bad year. During the campaign, it was tossed around by billionaire candidates who insisted on telling groups of underprivileged children that they, too, could someday own a mega-yacht or run a slimy but extremely profitable health care corporation.  Now, John Boehner is blaming the Dream for making him howl like an abandoned puppy. It’s what my friend Rebecca Traister calls “Boehner doing Masterpiece Theater on the hard life of John Boehner.”  Traister is the author of “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” a chronicle of the Clinton-Obama battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. One of the best-remembered moments in that campaign — Hillary Clinton cries in New Hampshire — is an excellent example of the difference between what men and women can get away with, tear-wise.  “Hillary didn’t cry,” Traister pointed out. “Not a drop of liquid fell below her lower lash.” With her back to the wall and the presidency on the line, Clinton approached the edge of a sniffle and we are still talking about it. Boehner is driven to great, noisy sobs when he contemplates the fact that as a youth, he mopped the floor at his father’s tavern.  Besides the crying gap between men and women, there’s also one between Republicans and Democrats. On the one hand, you have the folks who can’t afford tears because it makes them look weak, and on the other, the people who are presumed to be tough and hard-nosed, for whom crying is an attractive sign of complexity.  Boehner is opposed to extending unemployment benefits for the jobless, and he wants to kill off the law that guarantees health coverage to all Americans. So you know when he starts weeping when his wife says she’s “real proud” of him, it’s not a sign of softness.  In 2007, he cried while delivering a speech on the floor of the House, in support of funding for the war in Iraq. “After 3,000 of our fellow citizens died at the hands of these terrorists, when are we going to stand up and take them on?” he sobbed.  Then this year, he voted against providing money to take care of our fellow citizens who became ill while doing rescue and reclamation work at ground zero after the terrorist attack.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 16, 2010, on Page A39 of the New York edition with the headline: The Crying Game. Today's Paper|Subscribe
John Boehner is able to overcome his emotions on matters unrelated to John Boehner and the American Dream.