Brian's writes:
[Matt] finds absurd the idea--often floated by Republicans--that the GOP lost the Congress in 2006 because of their terrible addiction to pork. Why, he asks, do so many Republicans seem to believe this?
I don't think any Republicans, save for perhaps the most ideologically old-school and rigid of the lot, actually do believe this. Think of it as of a piece with the Harry Truman phenomenon I wrote about yesterday: It just sounds nicer to say "we have become less like Ronald Reagan" than to say "we are irremediably corrupt and responsible for a disastrous war, too."
Brian's right, but I think the pork claim is a bit more complicated than he gives it credit for. The issue isn't pork qua pork, but the reigning perception of conservatism that exists after they've systematically abandoned each and every one of its tenets. The actual level of fealty to party's principles when legislating is almost immaterial -- they could dip the text of Ted Stevens' Bridge to Nowhere appropriation in vats of pig fat on live national television, so long as they kept publicly announcing how committed they were to shrunken government and how disappointed they were with Ted Kennedy's bridge driving skills.
The question is how effective they were (or weren't) at protecting and manipulating their movement's public face. The pork issue is a shorthand for that larger conversation about the Republican Congress's failures to actively legislate and publicize in such a way that they seemed a coherent and attractive ideological force, rather than a bunch of power-loving establishmentarians. The Congressional GOP became nothing but an appendage of the president, and in doing, lost their identity. This blame-game is part of an attempt to use this rebuilding period in order to get it back.
