Voters turned a skeptical eye toward conservative-backed measures across the country Tuesday, rejecting an anti-labor law in Ohio, an anti-abortion measure in Mississippi and a tightening of voting rights in Maine.

ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.

A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you re starring in The Birth of a Nation, but you re actually just extras in a remake of "Citizen Kane."

The Republicans new "Pledge to America" promises the $3.8 trillion addition to the deficit and says nothing about serious budget cuts or governmental reforms that might remotely offset it. Surfing the Beltway talk shows last Sunday, you couldn t find one without a G.O.P. politician adamantly refusing to specify a single program he might cut at, say, the Department of Education (Pell grants?) or the National Institutes of Health (cancer research?). And that s just the small change. Everyone knows that tax cuts for the G.O.P. s wealthiest patrons must come out of Social Security and Medicare payments for everybody else.

...Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin prot g , Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a slush fund ; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the N.A.A.C.P. and the news media were all soiled by this episode. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, who believe in fundamental fairness for all, grapple with the poisonous residue left behind by the many powerful people of all stripes who served as accessories to a high-tech lynching.

So far this season, the Republicans have offered two new models of their future. One is the Tea Party vision, in which outsiders full of spirit and excitement overthrow the old order. In North Carolina, there was so much spirit and excitement that voters gave the top spot in a Congressional primary to a former drug addict who, according to court documents, once referred to the United States government as the Antichrist and claimed to have personally located the Ark of the Covenant.

Utah Republicans have denied Robert Bennett, a very conservative three-term senator, a place on the ballot, because he s not conservative enough. In Maine, party activists have pushed through a platform calling for, among other things, abolishing both the Federal Reserve and the Department of Education. And it s becoming ever more apparent that real power within the G.O.P. rests with the ranting talk-show hosts.

Some of the images from the run-up to Sunday s landmark health care vote in the House of Representatives should be seared into the nation s consciousness. We are so far, in so many ways, from being a class act.

Rachel Maddow talks with Libertarian political consultant and blogger Stephen Gordon about the effort by Republicans and corporate interests to take over the actual grassroots Libertarian anti-tax, small-government movement. This video is from MSNBC’s News Live, broadcast Dec. 29, 2009. Download video via RawReplay.com