You missed the beginnings of the Tea Party. Originally it was Dick Armey using Koch money to astroturf the various deficit-hawks and anti-tax folks into a “grassroots” movement, but it quickly got all the various other right-wing crazies thrown in alongside them. That let it do a lot of dirty work for the Republicans by bashing Democrats without the Party needing to take any responsibility for what they said, but it also had the effect of keeping anybody who actually still cared about the budget out of the way, lumping them with the extremists instead of letting them demonstrate what was basically a centrist position (“don’t be stupid with money”.)
(The deficit, of course, had been no problem at all until 2008, after Bush had tripled it by funding his wars on mostly off-budget credit while cutting taxes for the rich, and making sure Obama didn’t restore taxes on the rich to pre-Bush levels was the core of the GOP’s fiscal policy for the next N years.)
