My post over at Plum Line today looks at the two strategies under consideration by House Republicans: repeating last year's excellent results (can they get their approval ratings under 5%?), or Not Being Seen.
The key question, as I say over there, is about the Members who last year appeared to be far more concerned about being labeled RINOs than they were about the general image of the party, or even about how their own votes (such as, for example, the crusade against Planned Parenthood) would play with general election swing voters. I do wonder what they'll make of the presidential nomination battle. On the one hand, Mitt Romney's nomination should tend to reassure them that perhaps the threat of Tea Party primaries against incumbents has ebbed. On the other hand, the various manias of the past year -- Newt, Prince Herman, Bachmann, and even Trump -- might scare them even further, since their own nomination contests are almost certainly far less structured to avoid the crazy than is the high-profile sequential presidential nomination process. I'm not sure how that all shakes out, but it's a good story for reporters to dig into, I'd think.