A GOP tidal wave

LIKE A SWIFT tailback about to be thrown for a loss on a broken play, the American electorate cut back to its right yesterday - and desperately looked for daylight.

In arguably the most memorable - and most angry - midterm election in several generations, voters delivered a stiff rebuke to President Obama and his fellow Democrats by handing the keys to the U.S. House back to the GOP and weakening the Democrats' hold on the Senate.

Pennsylvania found itself on the leading edge of the trend, electing a new Republican governor in Tom Corbett as the GOP also appeared on the brink of taking control of the state Legislature.

In a contest that was closely watched nationally, Republican Pat Toomey - former leader of a pro-business lobby with close ties to Wall Street - defeated Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak and will replace Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter in the Senate.

But perhaps more significant is that Pennsylvanians will join their economically battered fellow Americans in dealing with the wider impact of a national Republican landslide led by the likes of tea-party favorite Rand Paul, who won easily in Kentucky, and incumbent ultraconservative Jim DeMint, of South Carolina.

The national GOP victories set the stage for two years of political warfare between conservative activists pushing for deep cuts in government spending and for lower taxes - even for millionaires - and Democrats who still control the White House and maintained a tenuous grip on the Senate.

Ironically, Republicans reaped big gains despite exit polling showing that most voters are unhappy with both parties in Congress - suggesting to some experts that yesterday's results weren't so much a sign of Americans' becoming more conservative as it was angry voters' looking for someone to blame for the moribund economy.

"The voters are looking for something, and they haven't found it yet," said Jim Broussard, history professor and political scientist at Pennsylvania's Lebanon Valley College.

Broussard and other experts noted that the rapid swing in voter sentiment from the 2006 and 2008 elections - which flipped Congress to a large Democratic majority and led to the election of Obama on the promise of sweeping change - to the GOP's powerful 2010 wave is historic in nature.

That's because neither party has been able to deliver much in an era when large numbers of Americans think the nation is on the wrong track (62 percent in the latest Ipsos/Reuters poll) and are fretting about the loss of jobs and prestige to China and elsewhere.

Now Obama and his party are paying the price for persistent unemployment that has risen from 7.6 to 9.6 percent since he took office.

A majority of voters told the Associated Press in its exit poll that they were casting votes to express opposition to the president, who today begins looking toward his 2012 reelection bid.

"I don't think the pro-Republican sentiment that may surface tonight is part of a long-term ideological shift in a conservative direction," said Costas Panagopoulos, editor of Campaigns & Elections who also teaches political science at Fordham University.

It's more that "voters are frustrated, especially with the economy and with Washington."

The 2010 election will be remembered long after the last sound waves from the blaring attack ads of a $4 billion barrage - yes, that's billion with a "b" - drift off into space.

The development that got the biggest headline was the dramatic emergence of the so-called tea-party movement, a loose coalition of right-wing troops rallied by conservative media on talk radio and the Fox News Channel - united in strong dislike of Obama while paying lip service to steep reductions in spending and the national debt.

Less noticed, but arguably as significant, was the public's broader turn away from conventional politicians while looking for leadership to entertainment figures like Fox's Glenn Beck, the guru to the tea-party movement, and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, who on Saturday drew a huge throng of mostly younger voters to the National Mall to rally for "sanity" in public discourse.

But in the end, pleas for civility were drowned out by the shrillness of negative TV advertising, including an estimated $200 million paid for by anonymous donations - floodgates that were opened just this year by a much-debated Supreme Court ruling.

Exit polls found that those who voted yesterday were more conservative (41 percent compared with 34 percent in 2008, according to the Pew Research Center) and also markedly older and whiter than two years ago, when a large showing of young and minority voters boosted Obama's historic campaign.

The New York Times said four of 10 voters expressed tea-party support.

But that was not universal.

Several tea-party hopefuls were rejected by voters wary of their extremism or controversial past statements - including Christine O'Donnell, the upstart Republican trounced yesterday in Delaware's U.S. Senate race by Chris Coons after the media fixated on her earlier views on social issues like masturbation. In Nevada, right-wing Senate challenger Sharron Angle - who once spoke of "Second Amendment remedies" to the nation's political dilemma - was trailing in what once looked like a golden opportunity for the GOP to oust Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The new political realities in Washington and in Harrisburg don't really look promising for restoring sanity or calm discourse.

Republican leaders vowed in the final days of the campaign that there will be no compromise with the White House and that their main goal, in the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is "for President Obama to be a one-term president."

But to achieve success, they may need to resolve intramural warfare between radical tea partyers and old-line conservatives within the GOP.

"This is not a Republican victory," a founder of the group Tea Party Patriots, Jenny Beth Martin, told the New York Times last night, and her strident tone was echoed by the movement's best-known victor, Kentucky's Paul, son of libertarian 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul.

"There's a tea-party tidal wave, and we're sending a message," Paul told supporters last night, promising to lead a movement for fiscal restraint, limited constitutional government and balanced budgets.

House Republicans have said they will make spending cuts their top priority and have pledged one budget-reduction vote every week.

Another winner last night was not on the ballot anywhere:

Former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, whose support of tea-party candidates like Paul and New Hampshire Senate winner Kelly Ayotte ensured she will be considered a front-runner if she decides to seek the White House in 2012.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.