The Official Blog of National Taxpayers Union
Republican Main Street Partnership has got it wrong
Posted by Kristina Rasmussen - November 09, 2006Perhaps the sniveling
press release issued by the “centrist” Republican Main Street Partnership was just sour grapes considering how many of their “moderate” Republican House members lost to Dems (especially when they campaigned on Demo-light themes). However, their arguments just don't add up.
The RMSP is claiming that a “handful of zealots” destroyed the “big tent” of the Republican party, and that voters then repudiated this by voting Dem. As a side note, I didn’t think that horse slaughter and timid earmark reform really counted as “cow-towing” to the far right.
But based on our NTU Rates Congress
data,
- Of the 19 Republican House Members confirmed as being ousted from their
seats as of yesterday, just 2 were recipients of NTU's "Taxpayers' Friend
Award" in 2005 for attaining a Rating score of at least 70 percent.
- The remaining 17 losing incumbents posted an average NTU Rating of just
56 percent last year, several points below the overall average for the
GOP.
- The six Republican Senators (including George Allen on the assumption
that Jim Webb's lead holds up) who were defeated, by and large did not
compile very good records on taxpayer issues. The defeated six on
average scored 59 percent in NTU's Rating in 2005. The rest of the
Senate Republican caucus averaged 70 percent. Only one of the defeated
Senators (George Allen) scored higher than the average for the entire
caucus.
For the most part, GOP candidates who strayed from the principles of limited government were more likely to be defeated, not the other way around.
Add Comment -
CAP-811 said on Nov 09 2006 at 1:06pm
I'm not a grammatical nit-picker by nature, but the sentence in the first paragraph of RMSP's news release was too ridiculous for me to ignore. A sentence in the release states: "for the last two years centrist GOPers have warned the leadership of our party of the consequences of pushing a legislative agenda cow-towing to the far right in our party." I believe the proper spelling for the word embodying the definition of "performing an obsequious act" is "kowtowing." As far as I can tell, "cow-towing" would be the act of chaining a bovine to one's car and dragging it down the highway. I guess RMSP's constant push for more federal spending on education hasn't helped its media relations staff all that much.
Coincidence? said on Nov 09 2006 at 1:11pm
Google's quote of the day:
There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cicero said on Nov 09 2006 at 4:35pm
Bob Novak on why Republicans lost (my emphasis):
[The GOP relied upon] familiar Republican incumbents, who had delivered government pork for their district, negating intense voter hostility by using the party's time-tested machinery to get out its vote. These tactics proved useless in the face of a wave that was not so much pro-Democrat as it was anti-Republican. Only gerrymandered House districts prevented a landslide that would have given the Democrats a House majority of historic proportions, approaching 50 seats.
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