How the right handles losing

It remains to truly be seen how the right wing populist movement, the so called Tea Party etc, will, in the long term, respond to losing HCR, but its worth keeping an eye on this for several reasons.

It's already clear, given the vandilism committed at several democratic congressmen's offices around the country, that the general levwel of fear, hate, and paranoia the republican party has been inciting against this bill is having some frightning consequences.

If that sort of mob like response continues, it will tell us alot about the Republican party.

However, wether the response by the republicans is violent or not, its also worth seeing if Republican ground forces get tired, feel defeated, etc, because this, again, gets at what I feel may be a diffrence between the republican and democratic coalitions.

Democrats, after being defeated, feel, well, defeated.  They tend to step quietly, become less engaged, and go home for awhile.  They are long soul searching post-mortems.  For better or for worse, the response of democratic voters to defeat, by and large, is, again, to feel defeated.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the response of Republican voters to defeat is *not* to feel defeated.  Instead, they get angry.  Republicans, after defeat, bounce right back and aggressivly fight democrats.  They lost 2008 by historic margins, and they bounced right back to fight aggressively with the democrats.  More to the point, it was this very bouncing back aggressively that begin to diminish democratic popularity.  It is clear that the opposition party's response to the political reality, whatever that reality may actually be, to a certain extent dictates how the electorate *percieves* that political reality, and thus begins affecting the political reality itself.