I say the Tea Partiers should go for it:

The tea-party movement is trying to regroup after taking some licks in this month's elections. Several groups already are setting their sights on 2014 congressional races, in which they plan to promote their preferred candidates and hope to weed out Republicans they consider insufficiently conservative.

Yeah, that's the ticket! You know, if we get enough Tea Partiers as the GOP nominees, as BooMan notes, Democrats may be able to take back the House and keep the Senate.

You know they make ideal opponents, because they have such a fine grasp of reality ... the reality on Planet Bizarro, that is:

Tea-party activist Greg Fettig, a founder of Hoosiers for a Conservative Senate and a backer of Mr. Mourdock, said the main lesson from the loss is that activists need to be sure the campaigns they support are well-run.

If by "well run" he means "not prone to saying insane things that make voters flee them in droves," he might have a point. But that would not describe any known or likely Tea Party candidate.

But of course it can't be them. It can't be that their gravitational pull forced every GOP candidate, including Mitt Romney, into such extreme far-right positions that they couldn't appeal to the broader American electorate. Heavens no. It was the fact that Romney tried to appear sane nonetheless:

In their post mortems of the 2012 election, activists put much of the blame for Mr. Romney's defeat squarely on the candidate.

"If we choose someone who runs a content-free campaign and is left of center, at least within the Republican Party, we will get our butts kicked," said Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation.

These folks deserve our encouragement.