WASHINGTON: John Boehner is a protege of Newt Gingrich, the fiercely partisan Republican who battled the Clinton White House in the 1990s and led his party to a spectacular midterm election victory that Mr Boehner hopes to mimic this week.

The Cincinnati-born politician, who leads Republicans in the House of Representatives, was one of a team that drafted a campaign document that helped the party seize control of Congress in 1994, its first House majority in 40 years.

With Bill Clinton floundering, the small band of Republicans produced a 10-point plan that proposed tax and welfare reforms, as well as a promise to balance the budget and curb congressional expenses. Republicans gained 54 seats that year.

Opinion polls point to a similar landslide tomorrow, returning control of the House to the Grand Old Party after just four years and in the midst of another Democratic president's first term.

The urbane Mr Boehner (pronounced Bay-ner), a two-pack-a-day smoker with piercing blue eyes and a perpetual suntan, will probably be elected speaker in the new Congress should history be repeated.

That would crown a 20-year congressional career, rewarding him for staunch resistance to Barack Obama's legislative program so far, while handing him a big say in the President's agenda.

He led opposition to the healthcare reforms - leading a chant on the floor of the House of ''Hell, no!'' - and rejected his $US787 billion economic stimulus.

If he is anything like his erstwhile mentor, Mr Gingrich, Mr Boehner will prove a challenging opponent.

''I came here to fight for a smaller, less costly and more accountable government, and to the extent that [Obama] wants to work with us … I would certainly welcome it,'' he says.

His obstructionist tactics do not appear to have always come naturally to the former plastics and packaging businessman, one of 12 children raised in a modest Midwest household.

The congressional low point for the representative for a conservative Ohio farming electorate came in 1998 when he was swept aside in a coup that removed Mr Gingrich, who was fighting a House ethics inquiry. But he bounced back, becoming chairman in 2000 of the House education and workforce committee, where he bridged party differences to deliver George Bush's ''no child left behind'' schools bill. By 2006, he was back as leader.

He has been criticised for his association with lobbyists and for the support he receives from corporations. But he counters: ''The question is not how close I am to them, the question is whether the people agree to what I'm doing.''

He has been named the Capitol's No. 1 party animal by Washingtonian magazine. Married, with two adult children, Mr Boehner, 60, has lived in south-west Ohio his entire life.