Ed Kilgore gets this just about right:

[...] I don’t think conservative activists much care whether they get their way via stealth as opposed to a grand national repudiation of the New Deal and the Great Society. After all, the very core of today’s conservatives—the so-called “constitutional conservatives”—don’t much believe in democracy to begin with, unless it happens to be useful at some particular point in restoring the Eternal Verities that must be permanently enforced through public policy.

There’s no need to phrase it in subjective terms. Republicans have made this their strategy repeatedly in recent years. Oh, you could look at Mitch Daniels breaking his campaign promises and moving to dismantle Indiana’s labor unions, or Scott Walker breaking his word and targeting public sector workers when he said he wouldn’t in the campaign, or Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder running as a self-conscious moderate and then moving to the hard right on pretty much every issue. The latter issue, admittedly, is complicated since Snyder’s moderate campaign helped him win a landslide that swept in a right-wing Republican legislature, which set the tone far more so than the politically inexperienced “outsider” governor. But it’s not as though those legislators felt the need to honor the campaign promises that indirectly got them into office. But I digress…

So, there are plenty of examples showing the emerging Republican strategy: say what the voters want to hear in public, do what the Kochs want done in private. Romney seems to be transparently going for the same thing on a national level, and is an even more ideal vessel for it since he actually was a moderate a decade ago, and dumbasses like Michael Gerson and David Brooks are so thirsty for Republican moderation that they’ll drink the sand of Romney. Them and most of the institutional media, I guess, hence the “Moderate Mitt” meme’s emergence in spite of no real factual basis to back it up. None of this should be considered shocking (I mean in the sense of being surprised–it is shocking in and of itself) since this is what you get with a party with a, shall we say, culture of deceit. It’s the way of things that, not only do powerful, cynical people not feel bad about lying, it’s positively a thrill to put one over on the dumb yokels out there who are too dumb to figure it out. I suppose I should link to this again. Needless to say, when a party is at a point where its major actors find lying about their policy positions a feature and not a bug of their strategy, you really have got to wonder how long they can really last. P.S.Kilgore also makes this worthwhile point:

The whole grand strategy for conservatives this cycle was to get a Republican Congress and a president pliable enough to agree to sign the aforementioned reconciliation bill implementing the Ryan Budget (not to mention make and get confirmed the fateful fifth vote on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade). No, Romney wasn’t their dream candidate, but he made the requisite promises not to stand in the way of a Republican Congress’ will, as Grover Norquist explained earlier this year. And they didn’t even need to trust him, because the real power would be at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. I honestly don’t think it occurred to anyone in either party until fairly recently that there was a decent chance Republicans could fall short in the Senate even if Mitt Romney won the presidency. The landscape, after all, was so incredibly in their favor, with only 10 of 33 seats to protect and seven Democrats retiring, two of them in deep red states. But then Snowe retired and then Lugar lost his primary and then Akin imploded and then GOP candidates underperformed in Florida and North Dakota and New Mexico and Arizona and Hawaii, and now the Mourdock time bomb has gone off, and it’s just a friggin’ fiasco!

This is a big story, though there’s more to it. Romney has outperformed his party for a number of reasons, even if he’s underperformed what people expected of him personally. But it’s important not to forget that the GOP is, just, incredibly unpopular. Senate candidates can’t escape their party affiliation, so even good candidates who haven’t run terrible campaigns (like Linda Lingle in Hawaii), or decent candidates in red states, have struggled to close the deal because of how toxic a reputation their party has. The Tea Party is a component of this because of the ways their influence has led to the selection of lousy candidates in some of these races, too, but that feeds into the broader dynamic, since the public perception of Republicans isn’t helped by your Todd Akins and Richard Mourdocks. It does appear that presidential candidates are able to transcend party affiliation to some extent based on personality and other factors, which is utterly silly but that’s how it is, and House races get much less attention paid to them so paid media can really make a strong difference there, perhaps trumping party in many cases. But Senate races get a good amount of attention, and the Republican label just isn’t an asset these days. We might well be headed toward an era where Republicans can’t put together a winning electoral map for the presidency and are hopeless in the Senate, but are able for a while (thanks to redistricting) to hold onto the House because of these factors. Like a mirror reflection of the Reagan era.