But the last six weeks have left Republicans pointed into a stiff headwind. With polls and angry town hall meetings suggesting that many voters were wary if not opposed to the Medicare overhaul, party unity and optimism gave way to a slow-motion backtracking in the House and, in the Senate and on the presidential campaign trail, a bit of a Republican-on-Republican rumpus.
Even before the Republican loss Tuesday night in the race for a vacant House seat from New York ? a contest fought in large part over the Medicare proposal ? Democrats were clinging to the developments like koalas to eucalyptus trees, hoping that the plan?s toxicity among many voters would give them a shot at retaining control of the Senate and, in their most vivid dreams, taking back the House majority.
Eager to press their advantage, Senate Democrats will stage a vote on the Medicare plan as soon as Wednesday, forcing Senate Republicans into a yes-or-no choice that both sides know will become the basis of countless campaign commercials over the next year and a half.
It is still a long way to Election Day 2012, the underlying problem of a long-term fiscal imbalance remains as pressing as ever and Democrats face divisions and messaging problems of their own.
But after a 2010 election that seemed to signal not only a Republican resurgence but also a rejection of big government and a need for bold, Tea Party-type steps to slash spending, the politics now look a whole lot more complicated. Both parties are being reminded anew that voters like the idea of budget cuts, but that they often recoil when those cuts threaten the programs that touch their lives.
While well aware that there were political risks, many Republicans went into this year convinced that the rapid growth of the national debt had changed the public mood when it came to tackling the entitlement programs, starting with Medicare, the biggest driver of projected future deficits. In an ambitious budget plan written by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, House Republicans embraced a proposal that would convert Medicare into a subsidized program for the private insurance market.
Even after Tuesday night?s loss in the New York special election, in a district Republicans had held for decades, some Republicans remain chin out, calling the Ryan plan much-needed medicine that the public will eventually embrace.
Others up for re-election, and some of those running for president, will not firmly commit themselves one way or another. And a small but growing number are saying no.
The divisions among Republicans are in large part situational.
Candidates looking to shore up their conservative bona fides among Republican presidential primary voters, like Jon M. Huntsman Jr., a former governor of Utah, have praised the plan. Some Congressional incumbents, like Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, have weighed the respective threats of Tea Party primary challengers against the wrath of moderate or elderly voters, and decided not to support it.
Some presidential candidates seeking to appeal to a broader base, like former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, are trying to split the difference, saying that the plan is O.K. but that they will offer their own that will be even more refined.
Others still, like George Allen, a Republican candidate for Senate in Virginia, appear to be trying to suss out where the political minefields are, and refuse to say if they support the plan or not.
This sort of indecision has further inflamed those Republicans who continue to enthusiastically back the plan, even though the House has more or less conceded that it will not become legislation this year. ?I?m looking for them to embrace our formula in the Ryan budget,? said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, concerning Republican candidates who will not commit support for it.
But just as each candidate must take a measure of their own race, the party?s response is also circumstance-driven. Newt Gingrich, a presidential candidate who seemed to think he had the gravitas to walk his party back from an increasingly toxic issue, denounced the plan to great retribution from both the establishment and Tea Party wings, and had to recant. Senator Scott P. Brown of Massachusetts, who is running for reelection in a tough state, said he would vote against the plan but was greeted largely by silence within his party.