I tip my cap to the marketing and messaging geniuses in the Republican Party. The ability to continue to control the media to buy into their nonsensical positions and their re-writing of history while at the same time fooling voters into voting against their own self-interests is quite an accomplishment.
It is amazing to me that their "Big Government is the problem" and "Deficit spending that will bankrupt our nation" themes are believed by so many only a few short years after it was the policies enacted by their own party that caused the problems in the first place.
When questioned about how they are going to "restore fiscal sanity" and how they are going to pay for the extension of the Bush tax cuts, they change the subject. It is clear to anyone that is paying attention that they have no answers. Unfortunately for our country, it appears that not many people are really paying attention. When you can sell a majority of the people a defective product and use lies and deception to do it all while under the noses of a supposed impartial watchdog media (HA!), it is something to behold.
It appears to me that the strategy was to de-emphasize the toxic "Republican" brand. I don't think they intentionally invented the Tea Party for this, but I do think that they let it flourish and to pretend like it was some separate party even though it was still Republicans.
Just listen to the speeches of almost every high profile victor last evening. "This is less a party victory and more a victory for the American people". Rarely was the term "Republican" used. They have their party winning by running away from their own party. I find it incredibly amazing that this could be pulled off.
I understand that this may seem like a problem for them. They will have expectations from the hard core Teahadists that they won't be able to fulfill. But where are these extreme nut-jobs going to go? I still believe most of these hard core Tea Partiers don't really give a shit about fiscal issues at all, but are more fired up about a black man occupying the White House. They will be equally fired up in 2012 regardless of how much the Republican Party disappoints them over the next two years. This group really doesn't matter anyway. They are the extreme right wing of the Republican Party and would never vote for a Democrat anyway.
It is the moderates who swing elections that I think this strategy worked on. They hate the "politics" of politics. They don't like phony characters from either party. They are tired of being lied to and mislead. Other than the hot-button social issues (which don't seem to be all that important to these folks), they don't see much difference between these two parties. They see all the shouting and tune it out. They do, however, end up picking up the big messages being pushed by the parties. We know who won the messaging battle with such themes as "Big Government spending us into economic failure", "Government takeover of health care", "Need more tax cuts for everyone (rich too!)", "Democrats don't know how to stimulate jobs in the public sector", ....
The really scary part of this whole deal is that as well as the Republicans did this could have been much worse for the Democrats. The one big failure of the Republicans this cycle was that the nut-jobs and extremists got more powerful than I think they would have liked. I think Republican party leaders thought that they could maintain more control on the Tea Party movement than they could. The movement took on a life of its own and screwed over the party in several races by nominating un-electable candidates. The party leaders did try to assert some control but laughably this only seemed to make the nut-job candidates even stronger. It is an issue for Republicans going forward to keep this group in check in the Senate and House and in the 2012 primaries.
Democrats need to more clearly define a marketing strategy. They need to come up with messages that are pounded into the general public's mindset with marketing and messaging campaigns. They need to propose legislation that matches these messages. They should not make compromises to this legislation if the compromises gut the original key provisions of the bill.
I really doubt any of this will happen, but we'll see. I fear lots of subpoenas and congressional investigations now that Republicans have the House back. I think we'll see nothing but gridlock and even worse partisan shouting and disagreement over the next 2 years. Republicans have openly stated that their number one goal is to get Obama out of the White House in 2012. I don't expect them to disappoint.