The exception: USAT finds President Obama a winner, although to these eyes he seemed oddly uninvolved. Perhaps that was how he "won," by mostly staying out of the ugly process.
The usual fate of third party movements in this country is to push a point of view which, if popular, gets subsumed into one of the two major parties. After which the third party fades into obscurity. It appears the Tea Party will follow this trajectory as the Republican Party absorbs their fiscal restraint meme.
