Tampa: So the Speaker of the House walks into a bar …

House Speaker John Boehner brings his borderline verklempt persona to the Tampa Bay Times Forum. In a spirited campaign speech, Boehner rouses the crowd with boilerplate call to arms: “We’re here to preserve this country the same way we built it: by exercising our God-given right to chart a new course … President Romney — boy, I like the sound of that.”

Then Boehner jumps into storyteller mode, recalling his boyhood days sweeping the floors and cleaning tables at the family bar outside Cincinnati — using barroom analogies to galvanize the faithful assembled around the idea of literally throwing Barack Obama out of the White House.

“So let’s say right now, a guy walked into our bar and said, ‘the private sector is doing fine.’ Well, do you know what we’d do? That’s right: we’d throw him out,” Boehner said. “If a guy walked into our bar ... and said, ‘if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,’ do you know what we’d do? Throw him out. ... President Obama just doesn’t get this. He can’t fix the economy because he doesn’t know how it was built. So in 70 days, when the American people walk into the voting booth, what should we do? Throw him out!”

Pundits on MSNBC question the appropriateness of Boehner’s imagery: the very idea of grabbing BHO by the collar and bodily heaving him out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue seems a bit over the top (much like the speaker himself). But given Boehner’s upbringing in a family of bar owners, his analogy was at least organic, if not exactly polite.

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