Recriminations and Analysis

As Democrats ascend to power and Republicans begin picking up the pieces of electoral defeat, there is a lot of spin going on as to what the big issues were that caused the Republicans to lose Congress. One particularly confusing bit of “analysis” was recently performed by the folks over at the Republican Main Street Partnership, which blamed the Republican Party’s defeat on its “pursuit of a far right agenda.”
If the Main Street Partnership were a libertarian group critical of Republicans’ social or Iraq War policies, this critique would make sense, but the Partnership is really a left-wing faction within the Party dedicated to fighting any efforts to restrain the growth of the federal government and specifically created in opposition to the Club for Growth.
With President Bush and the Republican-dominated Congress having grown government at rates comparable to Lyndon Baines Johnson and that left Bill Clinton in the dust, it is hard to argue that Republicans adhered to a “far-right” philosophy on spending and that cost them the election. But, when your policies have been followed and have failed so miserably, I suppose recriminations are to be expected.
The National Taxpayers Union has some excellent analysis of the Main Street Partnership’s agenda here.