http://www.tnr.com/article/the-permanent-campaign/97365/tea-party-gingrich-santorum-gop-primaries
Despite the electoral defeats of Tea Party candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell in 2010, to most Tea Partiers the lesson of the midterm elections was that the only thing keeping the Republican Party from an enduring majority was its lack of ideological rigor and its cowardly refusal to adopt total war tactics. The very concept of political “overreach,” the term most often applied to the losing side in Ohio’s recent Issue 2 battle, is alien to the Tea Party mind, in which extremism in the defense of liberty is never a vice.
The very fact that it’s possible to discuss Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum as practical options for the once-invincible right-wing movement shows how rapidly it has lost its way. If you were to script the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest according to the most lurid Tea Party conspiracy theories of secret Establishment manipulation of events, the results would look a lot like what we are seeing right now.
But no elaborate conspiracy theories are needed to explain the collapse of all the movement’s various champions. They wanted hard-core ideologues who scorned experience, conventional political skills, and any hint of sweet reasonableness, and that’s what they got: candidates likely to crumble under the glare of a national spotlight or be torn down for insufficient orthodoxy by the movement’s very supporters—or, in the case of most figures who have already risen and fallen during this election cycle, both.
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