A little bit funny, a whole lot jerky. I’m almost surprised he didn’t call him a “teabagger” too. DeMint’s doing damage control here, obviously, but not very well: Yes, it’s true that Obama’s more popular than his policies, and yes, the tea parties had a nice turnout, but to pick the day when the left’s on the brink of 60 to insist that America’s trending back towards its small-government roots seems a tad too nuanced by half. Granted, there’s a chance that Toomey will make a race of it in Pennsylvania, as DeMint predicts, but the odds are still way against it; as I reminded you earlier, if even the chairman of the NRSC is pessimistic about picking up seats, you shouldn’t get your hopes up. What’s most discouraging, I think, is how much of his argument here depends on simply waiting for the Democrats to overreach. That’s true of the party generally at the moment, too. There’s no discussion, really, of wooing new voters to accelerate a comeback; it’s all a matter of biding our time until the left alienates enough people to give us back a majority. How long are we prepared to wait?

His point at the end about the public’s appetite for checks and balances doesn’t really work, either. If that were true, how do we explain last year’s election results?