What in hell is John Boehner doing? What is he angling for?

first of all there's the Cruz factor:

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Even Republican allies say whatever strategy exists seems to be dictated not by the speaker, but by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the hard-line Republican who helped start the “Defund Obamacare” movement.

Asked what the House was doing, Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and a Boehner loyalist, said: “You really have to call Cruz, I’m not even joking about that. That’s really what you have to do, because he’s the one that set up the strategy, he’s the one that got us into this mess, and so we’ve got to know what the next move is.”

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then there's this revealing bit:

He has spent his days largely hunkered down inside his speaker’s suite, shuttling between his office and his conference room, meeting with small groups of lawmakers. He talks, he listens, and he tries to buck them up: Hang in there and stick with the team has become something of mantra.

Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican close to Mr. Boehner, said he believed that the speaker would like to see a deal that included a new way of calculating inflation that would slow the growth of federal benefits; a means testing for Medicare, as well as some other Medicare savings; and at least some slight changes to the Affordable Care Act, like a repeal of a medical device tax unpopular with some Democrats.

Mr. Cole said that Mr. Boehner wanted a broader negotiation that would involve current federal spending and the debt limit, one that “would move us towards some sort of — if not grand bargain — then big down payment on our fiscal problems,” Mr. Cole said.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/us/politics/boehner-urges-gop-unity-in-epic-battle.html?pagewanted=all