The GOP’s Alamo: Republicans are wasting no time in rewriting the history of their own defeat

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Human beings have been putting their best spin on defeats since the invention of “winning” and “losing.” Obviously, the many Republicans who don’t want to trash their colleagues on the record are going to look for the Alamo underneath the rubble of this loss. But this shutdown had meant a lot to the party. Only a few dozen current members of the GOP conference had endured the last shutdown in 1995–1996. Those who hadn’t—and some of those who had—have insisted for years that it was not truly a defeat for the party. In his 1998 memoir, Newt Gingrich blamed the media for making that shutdown a “story of Republican heartlessness.” By 2010, when he reminisced about the shutdown, Gingrich argued that its real lesson was that his GOP had held onto the House in 1996 and balanced the budget—and that if the GOP shut down the government to stop Obamacare, the country would rally to the cause.

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As dealmania spread across the Capitol on Wednesday, this spin remained battered but alive. “I haven't been home now for close to a month, and so it's not an easy venture all the way across the board,” said Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon, a class of 1994 Republican who returned to Congress this year after a decade in retirement. “As we saw last time, in 1996, we had the last government shutdown, 20-some days, and just a couple of years later we did the unimaginable: We balanced the budget for the first time in 40 years. We got through some of the most meaningful welfare reform that this country never believed was possible. I think part of it is that when both sides see that you're actually willing to stand and fight on principle, it changes the dynamic. It's not evident right now, but I think it will be.”

According to Salmon, shutting down the government for more than two weeks probably proved to most people that the feds could do more with less. “Most Americans probably thought, ‘Wait a minute, I thought this was supposed to be cataclysmic.’ Like with sequestration—we were told the sun wouldn’t come out the next morning, and it did. It was much ado about not a lot,” Salmon said. When it hurt, it was because President Obama wanted it to hurt. “We don’t think like that. We don’t shut down monuments to make a shutdown as painful as possible.”

Salmon was one of a half-dozen conservatives who met to talk this over at an on-the-record Wednesday panel sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. As the audience chowed on Chick-fil-A, conservatives denounced any suggestion that the party had been weakened by the shutdown. Idaho Rep. Raul Labrador’s main quibble with the party’s strategy—apart from all the weak-kneed members trashing their colleagues—was that it didn’t raise the debt limit while continuing to debate the continuing resolution, a ploy that would have lengthened the shutdown.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/10/republican_party_lose_on_government_shutdown_and_debt_limit_the_gop_rewrites.html