Yet another recent poll found that a majority of Americans would blame Republicans if a shutdown happened. But the idea that the GOP would suffer dire political consequences from a shutdown is another point the shutdown cheerleaders have taken to disputing. In an op-ed published on FoxNews.com on Tuesday, Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots and Brent Bozell of ForAmerica write: “After the 1995 shutdown the Republicans added two Senate seats in the 1996 elections and lost only two in the House. Claims that Republicans will suffer massive defeat at the polls after a government shutdown are ignorant of the historical record. Or dishonest.”

There’s one obvious problem with this argument: It ignores the biggest thing that happened at the polls in 1996 -- Bill Clinton’s landslide reelection. In 2014, if Republicans win just two additional Senate seats and lose two seats in the House, it would be considered a massive triumph for Democrats. But Martin and Bozell aren’t the first to argue that we’re remembering 1995 wrong. Ted Cruz also recently argued at length that “The sort of cocktail chatter wisdom in Washington that, ‘Oh, the [1995-96] shutdown was a political disaster for Republicans,’ is not borne out by the data.”

When the 1995 shutdown began, Cruz had just graduated from Harvard Law School and was clerking for a federal judge in Richmond. He was about to turn 25. Since I, like Cruz, was not in Washington at the time, I thought I’d ask someone who was. In 1995, Steve LaTourette was a freshman Republican congressman from Ohio. (After serving nine terms, he retired from Congress this year and has become an outspoken critic of the far-right wing of the House GOP.) When I asked him if we’re all misremembering and the shutdown actually benefited Republicans politically, he said, “Oh, God, no.”

LaTourette remembers the shutdown as a chaotic time for the House Republicans, due partly to the improvisational leadership style of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich. “There was no map for it. Nobody knew what the rules were,” he told me. “It was a little like the dog catching the car.” In meetings that went till 2 or 3 a.m., members agonized over how to resolve the standoff.

While the shutdown was under way, it wasn’t immediately clear who the public would hold responsible. Subsequent accounts, LaTourette noted, reported that the White House was just as worried as the Republicans in Congress about suffering political consequences. But in the end, he said, independent voters concluded from the crisis that the GOP couldn’t be trusted to govern. “We took the worse end of the public backlash -- [it was] ‘Why can’t you guys play nice?’” LaTourette said. Gingrich was famously depicted as a tantrum-throwing toddler on the cover of the New York Daily News, under the headline, "CRY BABY."