Republicans have grown increasingly confident over the summer about their chances of retaking control of the House, and possibly, the Senate. Before they choreograph their victory parties, they'll have to figure out how to handle the tea party's insurgents, who have frustrated mainstream Republicans and riven the party's ranks by pulling off primary victories over moderate candidates that the GOP had hoped would appeal to independent voters in November.
Results Tuesday in the last round of primary elections across the country before the November balloting added to the toll. The most notable tea party victory came in Delaware, where Christine O'Donnell, whom the state's GOP had flatly labeled as "unqualified," swept aside the favored GOP star, Rep. Michael N. Castle, in the race for the Republican nomination for the Senate seat held previously by Vice President Joe Biden and his interim successor.
Rep. Castle, a former two-term governor in Delaware, has for decades enjoyed wide support among Republicans and independents in a variety of offices. The predictability of his success may have been his undoing. In a light turnout - just 55,000 of the tiny state's 182,000 registered Republicans bothered to vote - Mrs. O'Donnell won by only 3,000 votes.
But that slim margin, and an endorsement by Sarah Palin, was enough to scoot her past Castle, never mind the hammering she had taken from GOP leaders over her notorious talk about masturbation and charges that she had misused money from a previous campaign for personal expenses.
In New York, another Palin-endorsed tea party underdog candidate, Carl Paladino, toppled former congressman Rick Lazio to become the Republican candidate for governor of the Empire State. The Buffalo multimillionaire, a political novice, played hard on voter disenchantment with the power structure in Albany, ranting against "the ruling class" in the state house, blustering about a "people's revolution" and basking in his admitted "anger."
His schtick - he roamed the state with a pit bull and promised to take a baseball bat to the capital - earned him a two-to-one victory margin. It also apparently erased concerns over reports of his e-mails to friends with racist jokes and pornographic pictures, and his proposal to convert prisons into dormitories for welfare recipients and give them lessons in hygiene.
Establishment Republicans fear that tea party activists have taken too much control in the primaries, giving victories to far-right candidates who will have a harder time talking seriously - or being taken seriously - on nuts-and-bolts issues of education, taxes, health care and infrastructure that centrist swing voters worry about.
Their dilemma is that they feel hostage to tea partiers' grip. They're in a quandary over whether to disavow tea party favorites, sit on the sidelines in the election, or get behind them because they wear the GOP banner. Given the startling image the Republican party is getting for having tea party candidates for the U.S. Senate like Nevada's gaffe-ridden, Sharron Angle, who proposes to dismantle Medicare, and Kentucky's radical neoconservative Rand Paul, who suggests relabeling mountain-removal mining so it won't sound so bad for the environment, it's no wonder the GOP is concerned.
And now there is Christine O'Donnell, whose glibness seems naturally suited to the Palin script. Indeed, the GOP's problem with Tea Party destroyers could well become a national concern. What will happen if the nation begins to elect as senators people whose aggressive prescriptions for national policies are so destructive or off-the-wall that they can't be taken seriously?
The nation needs credible, adult solutions to complex problems, not frightful fantasies. If the tea party and GOP can't agree on that, they should require their candidates to follow the medical maxim: first, do no harm.