"Cantor’s role as Obama’s nemesis, as the National Review recently dubbed him, is remarkable for several reasons—none more so than the fact that, although he’s now the darling of the tea party, he initially rose to power in Washington by standing for almost everything the tea party is against. Elected to Congress in 2000, right as House Republicans were entering their Caligula phase, Cantor was soon tapped by Roy Blunt, the House majority whip at the time, to serve as his chief deputy. According to a former Republican congressman, Cantor was given a seat at the GOP leadership table on the advice of Blunt’s then-girlfriend, now-wife, who was a Philip Morris lobbyist and who appreciated the fact that Cantor is Jewish. “Abigail was Jewish, and she understood the implications for fund-raising,” the former congressman says. “Eric had access to donors we didn’t typically have access to.”
Cantor’s primary job as a member of the whip operation was to cajole his fellow Republican congressmen into voting for many of the bills the tea-partiers now decry as the height of fiscal irresponsibility —including, most infamously, the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug legislation, for which he worked hand in hand with pharmaceutical-industry lobbyists and Karl Rove. “There were some of us who certainly wanted him to play a more forceful role there in fighting against that legislation rather than for it,” recalls Jeff Flake, an Arizona congressman and Cantor ally who was one of 25 House Republicans to vote against the bill"..............READ MORE
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