Jonah, Yuval, Shannen, Rich – all good points. It’s important to remember that — holding O’Donnell’s personal shortcomings off to one side — the disagreement on the Right over the Delaware primary is procedural, not substantive. We all want a more conservative Congress that shrinks the size and scope of government. We disagree on how to get there.

As a card-carrying gradualist, I watched last night and thought: It seemed like only yesterday we on the Right were shaking our heads at the progressive wing of the Democratic party for over-reading their mandate and foolishly pulling the country to the left farther and faster than it was comfortable going. Are we doing the same here tonight?

I don’t have to tell Cornerites how the policy gets made, and the fact is that if the general were held tomorrow Mike Castle and Christine O’Donnell would both be casting the crucial votes of the 112th Congress from the same place: their sofas.

But at the same time, the tea party movement in this country has a right to feel bold and ambitious. It has already ensured that Congress — and the Senate in particular — will not just have more Republicans but more conservatives — from Pennsylvania to Kentucky to Nevada to Alaska — even as it has scared many of the wastrels in the current caucus back to fiscal sanity.

So perhaps tea-partiers were right to go all-in in Delaware. Even over night, O’Donnell’s prospects have improved as she’s seen a spike in her fund-raising and the news that she’ll receive NRSC’s full support.

Months ago, writing a half-hearted defense of Republicans like Orrin Hatch and Mitt Romney, who at various times in the past supported elements of Obamacare, I got at this tension between my gradualist worry-wortism and my excitement over the power of the tea parties:

Conservatism has a long and storied history of pragmatism. The Godfather, Edmund Burke, ended his Reflections by declaring himself a man who wanted to “preserve consistency, but who would preserve consistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end, and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he sails may be endangered by overloading it upon one side, is desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that which may preserve its equipoise.”
I hope it isn’t too naive to wonder if the one-time Republican supporters of the legislative ancestors of Obamacare weren’t just trying to prevent the ship of state from tipping any farther to the left than it had to. In other words, if they were concerned primarily with not letting the abjectly terrible be the enemy of the merely bad.
The difference between then and now is that the most fired up group of people in this country are small-government constitutionalists, who dare to hope for not just of a decceleration of our descent into social democracy, but of a real-live reversal. I think their passion might have something to do with the GOP finding religion on health care.

Win or lose, Christine O’Donnell’s victory bears this out.