ContributorNetwork - COMMENTARY | The tea party was supposed to be the faction that pushed the GOP to the right, or even control the Republican Party. After the 2012 New Hampshire primary, one has to wonder where the tea party went.

Jamelle Bouie, American Prospect
If the 50 states were 50 people, and you had to rank them by ideology, then South Carolina—which holds the second Republican presidential primary on January 21—would be the Tea Partier of the group. Forty-six percent of South Carolinians identify as conservative. Republicans hold every statewide elected office and control both the state house and senate. The governor, Nikki Haley, was on the vanguard of the Tea Party in the 2010 congressional elections, and her predecessor—the right-wing libertarian Mark Sanford—was among the five governors to reject...

Reuters - The fierce battle between the Tea Party and establishment Republicans for control of the party is on full display in the Texas race for the U.S. Senate this year, and the outcome could have national consequences.

Politico - Mark Meckler pleads guilty to disorderly conduct for trying to board an airplane with a gun.

The Atlantic Wire - Now that The New York Times pay wall is live, you only get 20 free clicks a month. For those worried about hitting their limit, we're taking a look through the paper each morning to find the stories that can make your clicks count.

To win just under 40 percent of the vote in a primary with five active candidates is pretty impressive, even for a candidate like Mitt Romney, who started off with significant advantages in New Hampshire.

Yes, he is well known there because he was governor of next-door Massachusetts, had run before, and owns a house on Lake Winnipesaukee. But the exit poll indicates Romney held his own among independents, tea-party supporters, and late deciders.

Keep reading this post . . .

Michael Barone, DC Examiner
To win just under 40 percent of the vote in a primary with five active candidates is pretty impressive, even for a candidate like Mitt Romney, who started off with significant advantages in New Hampshire.Yes, he is well-known there because he was governor of next-door Massachusetts, had run before and owns a house on Lake Winnipesaukee. But the exit poll indicates Romney held his own among independents, tea party supporters and late deciders.He didn't lose ground in the heat of the campaign, despite his ragged performance in Sunday's debate (he was obviously not candid about why he...

After watching the (predictable) results of the New Hampshire Primary, I can only conclude that Americans are sheep, or that things in the country at large are not as bad as the loudmouths have been saying.

The Tea Party has largely vanished as an articulate force, having blended into the Republican Party. And the Occupy movement is silent as well, retreating into a wonky corner of some building lobby in downtown New York. The millionaires and billionaires (Romney and Huntsman) fought it out for who will rule us after Obama.

Unlike in other countries, our protestors don't continue; they don't even register at the ballot box. They make some noise, get the pundits excited, and retreat. Even Ron Paul supporters have been muted.

This isn't the way to make changes. I am reading Pity the Billionaire, and it is amazing what happened to Americans in 2008. Wealth vanished. Wealth was transferred. The guilty were rewarded. Nobody paid. It's very different from the '30s, when the country vowed never to allow errant bankers to clean out ordinary people again.

On both sides of the political fence, we know this. And yet, our party alignments are so hard wired that we can't come together. We blame each other, our Democratic or Republican neighbor, not the culprits.

You ought to read this book, which details how things happened during the Recession of the 30s to bring the country together, as opposed to how things are happening now. A dear friend of mine who died a year ago at age 87 was fond of telling me this recession would be worse than the Great Depression because in this recession, people don't care to help each other.

We still don't. We are not working for the country. We are working to save ourselves. Each one of us is working to save himself, and the hell with everybody else. We are all in survival mode, fighting each other for scraps of America's wealth.

It was Benjamin Franklin who said "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." It may be time to remember that, before casting a vote for a man who closed businesses, outsourced jobs, and took extraordinary profits or for a man who, in the last four years, sought merely compromise rather than true change.

Reuters - As Mitt Romney inches toward the Republican Party's presidential nomination, many conservative activists are increasingly focused on a different political prize for 2012: the Senate.

Mitt Romney has momentum heading into the "First in the South" primary, but in South Carolina he'll have to appeal to religious conservatives and Tea Party voters. And while the economy is the most important issue for many voters, Romney's rivals are already branding him as out of line with traditional South Carolina values.

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Rick Perry's campaign attempted to downplay his poor showing in New Hampshire, writing in a Tuesday evening statement that, effectively, he hadn't been trying to win the state anyway.

"Tonight's results in New Hampshire show the race for 'conservative alternative' to Mitt Romney remains wide open," Perry said in the statement. "I skipped New Hampshire and aimed my campaign right at conservative South Carolina, where we've been campaigning hard and receiving an enthusiastic welcome."

In fact, Perry spent a good amount of time in the state over the past few months, only bowing out there and heading to South Carolina over the past week.

He made a particularly memorable speech in the state in October, when he hugged a jug of maple syrup and some questioned whether he was drunk. In a November New Hampshire appearance, meanwhile, Perry mistakenly said that the national voting age is 21.

The statement continues:

I believe being the only non-establishment outsider in the race, the proven fiscal and social conservative and proven job creator will win the day in South Carolina.

South Carolina is the next stop. I have a head start here, and it's friendly territory for a Texas governor and veteran with solid outsider credentials, the nation's best record of job creation, and solid fiscal, social and Tea Party conservatism.

Perry received less than 1 percent of the vote.

AP - Mitt Romney won New Hampshire's Republican presidential primary by building on the strengths that carried him to a narrow victory in Iowa and bringing in a broader coalition of tea party supporters and conservatives, according to exit polls.

Brownstein & Reinhard, National Journal
The caucuses here may have reshuffled the cast, but they didn’t change the script that has guided the tumultuous GOP presidential contest over the past year. As before, two basic truths shape the Republican race: First, Mitt Romney is performing solidly but not spectacularly as the front-runner. And second, the conservatives in the overlapping tea party and evangelical Christian circles, who are most skeptical of him, still have not consolidated around an alternative who might derail him.

A Canadian rock band named The Tea Party has owned the domain name TeaParty.com since the early 1990s. Now, with seemingly no shortage of would-be buyers, the band has decided to sell to the highest bidder. Between its traffic numbers and its search value, it could be worth more than a million dollars.

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ContributorNetwork - The Associated Press reported Wednesday on the influence of Occupy in the Iowa caucuses. The news organization suggested that Occupy has yet to mature into a political force comparable to the tea party. As a result, AP said it doubts whether Occupy will develop into a liberal counterweight to the tea party this year.

Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times
A year ago, the tea party movement looked like an irresistible wave sweeping through the Republican Party. Anyone who hoped to win this year's GOP presidential nomination, it seemed, would need to embrace tea party activists' stringent demands for smaller government, lower taxes and deep cuts in spending.But in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, the three candidates who hewed closest to the tea party line — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich — sank straight to the bottom of the pack.

Frank James, NPR
Talk with Tea Party leaders here in South Carolina and you quickly realize that the toughest job in the Mitt Romney campaign would be the assignment of doing outreach to these activists. Maybe not a mission impossible, but close.They really want no part of Romney. And there appears to be little he could say or do between now and Jan. 21, the date of the South Carolina primary, to change that.

Reuters - The rough-and-tumble Republican race for the White House became even more entangled on Wednesday when Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann quit and Rick Perry decided to stay in after all.

The Truth-o-Meter says: Half-True | Rick Santorum ad claims he reformed welfare

A new Rick Santorum campaign ad asks, "Who has the best chance to beat Obama?" The answer: Santorum, of course. As images appear of the Republican presidential hopeful on the stump and walking with his wife, a voice-over calls him a "full-spectrum conservative" and "a favorite of the tea party for fighting corruption and taxpayer abuse." Then the words "reformed welfare" pop up in white type. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who also served two terms in the House, made welfare reform a central issue ...

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AP - With several attention-grabbing protests before Iowa's caucuses, Occupy Wall Street activists proved their movement did not end when its encampments in big cities dispersed. But they also showed the group hasn't matured into a political force, and it's not clear whether it will become a liberal counterweight to the tea party this election year.

Blom & Benko, Roll Call
Scott Rasmussen, in October, polled 1,000 voters on gold and found it popular, especially if characterized as a way to constrain big government and big banks.In November, American Principles in Action commissioned the Polling Company to drill deeper into the implications for the early contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.The Polling Company found that advocating the gold standard would move votes where they most matter. The gold standard is highly popular with tea party voters, movement conservatives and others disproportionately likely to attend the Iowa caucuses or vote in the...

Alan Greenspan, Financial Times
The failure of the “Super Committee” last year to reach a budget deal underscored the underlying wedge in US politics. The distribution of the electorate through most of the post-1945 years has been a dominant centre, slightly to the left or right of centre. This enabled legislative compromises to be reached with relative ease.But a political tsunami has emerged out of our past in the form of the Tea Party, with its ethos reminiscent of rugged individualism and self-reliance. That was a dominant force for over a century, but has faded since the New Deal.

The Christian Science Monitor - Three days ahead of the Iowa caucus, the tea party as any kind of solid voting bloc is practically nowhere to be found.

Matt Negrin, ABC News
When the tea party Republican Kent Sorenson left Michele Bachmann for Ron Paul, it was clear that the tea party has two opponents in this presidential election: President Obama, and Mitt Romney.Sorenson, a state senator in Iowa, said on Wednesday that Paul is the “most conservative” of the top-tier Republican candidates, and that he’s a better bet to beat Romney, the ex-governor of a liberal state who has struggled to win over the tea party. For some tea party members, Sorenson’s switcheroo is the echo of a desire in the movement to nominate a...