On the day after the midterm election, John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor did their best to convince Americans that the Republican Party had won a great victory. They, along with Mitch McConnell, began posturing and flexing their yet non-existent political muscle.

They began touting the Young Lions (themselves) as the guys who would lead the Republican Party back to their glory days.

They touted their Pledge to America as proof of their intentions without any credible evidence that they were in a position to carry out the promises.

A show of force is one thing, Ability is another. These three started the victory dance without all the dancers. First and foremost, November was NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, a victory for the Republican Party. The victory was possible for at least two other and disparate reasons. First, The Tea Parties of America gave impetus to a vapid, badly divided and impotent leadership.

Second, the not so young lions were taking all the credit and posited all the solutions. In fact, The Pledge to America was authored by Kevin McCarthy, Representative from California’s 22nd District, a fact not well-acknowledged by the young lions on November 3rd. The election was a victory by and for Conservative Americans – not the GOP.

Michael Steele, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner were woefully neglectful in at least two glaring respects. They all failed to take Lisa Murkowski to task when she was trounced by Joe Miller in the Alaskan Republican Primary and then launched a write-in campaign. They were pitiful when they failed to provide funding for the winnable campaign of Christine O'Donnell against Democrat Chris Coons in Delaware.

John Boehner is a tough campaigner, a no-nonsense Minority Leader with some fine credentials. He also carries some troublesome baggage. He is impulsive to a fault; his distribution of Big Tobacco campaign donations to colleagues on the House Floor was a glaring mistake which may still come back to haunt him.

Can John Boehner be trusted? He has never answered the question regarding his rumored extramarital affair. Are there other honest-to-God Conservatives opposed to raising the retirement age and without baggage more capable of becoming Speaker? I can think of a couple. One would be the financial whiz kid, Paul Ryan; maybe Eric Cantor or Kevin McCarthy or even Devin Nunes, a star in the making.

In any event, the Republican had better get used to the idea that the GOP is the Goliath of the People, not the former Grand Old Party of which Mr. Boehner is a dues-paying partier.

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