No one has vested more hope in the tea-party movement than the Democrats. For all the scorn and abuse they’ve heaped on the tea-partiers, they’ve counted on them for salvation.
The tea-partiers would push the GOP out of the mainstream. They would tar the party with their bumptious extremism. They would stoke a Republican civil war. The tea-partiers would, in short, redeem the Obama administration’s political fortunes no matter what.
This was the oft-repeated theory,…