The Armey Line

For an interpretation of current GOP political problems that is, I think, completely wrong take a look at Dick Armey's argument that insufficient fealty to low-spending dogma is responsible for the situation. The thing you'll notice is that there's not much of an argument here as such. Instead, it's a simple correlation observation -- the Bush Republicans have spent a lot of money, and now they're poised to lose seats. But all of the key policy steps that Armey's citing actually came before the 2004 election, which went fine for the GOP. What's changed between now and then isn't domestic policy (indeed, the economy, though still soft in many respects, is almost unquestionably better than it was two years ago) but the war in Iraq.