Within Republican circles, there’s widespread disagreement. GOP blame game: Who lost?

The government shutdown saga has drawn to an end. The debate within the GOP about who blew it is just beginning.

Since before the federal government closed its doors on Oct. 1, leaders within the Republican coalition have been privately – and sometimes not-so-privately – squabbling over who should take the blame for the unfolding political smashup. Some in the party questioned whether a shutdown and debt-ceiling standoff would do noticeable damage to the GOP, but many more always believed this would turn into a prime-time fiasco.


The question racing around Washington now is: Have Republicans learned their lesson? Will the GOP finally understand that when you touch the stove, it burns?

( PHOTOS: Debt ceiling fight: 20 great quotes)

Within Republican circles, however, there’s widespread disagreement about exactly what lesson the party might stand to learn. If there’s general consensus that the party got burned, there are already competing narratives on the right about whose hand it was that touched the burner.

Here are the three most prominent arguments already running through the GOP about who lost the shutdown – and who deserves to be written out of the movement going forward:

Ted Cruz preened his way into a massacre

The Texas senator became the face of the “Defund Obamacare” movement with a 21-hour Senate speech denouncing the Affordable Care Act. And as the country has soured on the government shutdown, Cruz’s name has become an epithet for both Democrats, who have jeered at House leadership with references to “Speaker Cruz,” and frustrated Republicans.

( WATCH: Timeline of Ted Cruz’s Obamacare crusade)

Cruz didn’t create the anti-ACA fever on the right or even bring it to its current pitch. But he did, more prominently than any other member of his party, make common cause with an array of groups on the right such as the Senate Conservatives Fund and Heritage Action, which have threatened incumbent GOP lawmakers who do not share Cruz’s hard line.

When his Senate colleagues demanded that he renounce the tactics of those groups, POLITICO reported that Cruz declined. While much of his party hopes to tame and channel the energy of the activist right, Cruz has acted to unleash it.

As a senator in conservative Texas – and as a possible presidential candidate in the conservative-dominated Iowa caucuses – Cruz’s hardball tactics have little political down side for him in the short term. A Pew poll published Wednesday afternoon found that his positive favorability among tea party Republicans has soared from 47 percent in July to 74 percent now.

( QUIZ: Do you know Ted Cruz?)

But Cruz has earned the enduring ire of many other Republicans for goading his fellow conservatives, especially in the House, into a fight that was doomed from the start. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer voiced exasperation in a radio interview last week, asking: “How exactly was he going to achieve abolition of Obamacare? Explain that to me. Has he ever explained it?”

The conservative editorial page of New Hampshire’s Union Leader newspaper criticized Cruz for what it described as a disingenuous “defund” strategy: “Virtually everyone, including Ted Cruz, knew this would not work. They did it anyway.”

Cruz staked his young political career on his unbending opposition to the ACA; now, he’s the most obvious fall guy in a party that needs one.

Leadership wimped out and made everything worse

Few conservatives – including Ted Cruz fans – dispute that the shutdown was a political loser for Republicans. But where most of the GOP’s national leaders pin responsibility on the wild-eyed Republican grass roots, conservative activists blame a very different culprit: the leaders themselves.

According to their line of thinking, the party’s congressional leadership erred badly by dismissing the “defund” movement as a fool’s errand until it was too late, allowing the party to stumble into a shutdown with no strategy and no clear demands, rather than cooperating with conservatives to force President Barack Obama’s hand.

If the leaders didn’t think defunding Obamacare was achievable, the theory goes, then they could have pursued another set of demands using the leverage of the budget and the debt ceiling. By the time House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposed entitlement reform talks in an Oct. 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the battle lines were already drawn.

“John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, and John Cornyn will ensure that Obamacare is fully funded and give the American public no delay like businesses have,” RedState blogger Erick Erickson warned last week. “In doing so, they will sow the seeds of a real third party movement that will fully divide the Republican Party.”

If this thinking is anathema to establishment Republicans, there’s at least some political firepower behind conservatives who share Erickson’s views: both the Club for Growth and Heritage Action declared the Senate compromise to end the shutdown was a “key” vote for assessing lawmakers.

“There are no significant changes to Obamacare, nothing on the other major entitlements that are racked with trillions in unfunded liabilities, and no meaningful spending cuts either,” Club for Growth official Andy Roth wrote in a vote alert to lawmakers. “If this passes, Congress will kick the can down the road, yet again.”

Some men just want to watch the world burn

Here’s the problem with blaming House and Senate leadership for the shutdown’s unsatisfactory end, Republicans say: You can’t criticize leaders for failing to extract modest concessions from Obama if you wouldn’t actually be willing to accept modest concessions and call it a win.

Over and over in the government shutdown – and really, throughout John Boehner’s tenure as speaker in the House – a loud rump of the GOP conference has torpedoed legislation it has viewed as insufficiently conservative. On Tuesday, Boehner had to abandon a proposal to end the shutdown that included a handful of conservative goodies when the hardest-line members of his conference made clear they could not support the package.

The reward for those conservatives? A Senate-brokered end to the shutdown that gave conservatives nothing to cheer about at all.

The problem, some Republicans argue, is not merely that Ted Cruz is a showboat or that outside groups demand confrontation without a plan to win. It’s also that there’s a gang of several dozen House members who simply do not care about accomplishing anything on policy. They don’t choose a hill to fight on based on where they think they can win; they just want to fight.

New York Post columnist John Podhoretz took the House’s right flank to task in a column titled “Suicide of the Right,” urging them to abandon their fantasy that a “vast silent majority of Americans” will join them in forcing Obama’s hand if only they stand up and fight.

“If Obamacare had been as unpopular as conservatives believed, their plan for the shutdown – that there would be a public uprising to force Democratic senators in close races in 2014 to defund it – would’ve worked,” Podhoretz wrote. “Their tactic failed, and now what they are left with is House Speaker John Boehner basically begging the president of the United States to negotiate with him.”

One national GOP strategist lamented that a band of lawmakers in the House – and a few in the Senate – had “stopped defining themselves by ideology and started defining themselves by the distance between them and the rest of the Republican conference.”

“This collapse is wrongly reported in ideological terms,” the strategist wrote in an email. “These guys are not more conservative than the rest of the conference. They’re just more disagreeable.”