View from a dirty socialist Brit:
You know, for all I disagreed with him, at least McCain was a sane, balanced individual who was popular, experienced and had a good life background. The rest of the world got behind Obama, sure, but we thought that McCain was a pretty decent person. Sure Palin was crazy but we saw through her appointment as a PR scheme to put some life into a boring ticket.
But then it went wrong. Some Social conservatives in the mid-west started to like Palin. A lot. They went crazy over her, idolised her, hung on her every word. Someone who was a PR gimmick, probably by McCain's admission too, was gaining credibility when that was never meant to be the outcome. McCain knew that putting her on the ticket was a hail mary, he didn't really think that she would be a good VP, just someone to appeal to a demographic. But this demographic is lucrative. Fox News saw this and started targeting its coverage towards this small minority to provide talking points for its news cycles, presenting the minority as a majority. The Tea Party wasn't a nuts fringe group it was a "constitutional movement" that wanted to get the "deficit under control".
This clearly wasn't the Tea Party's intention. The Tea Party can be much more easily traced back to a right-wing white lower-middle class disdain for liberal social policies on issues such as religion, drugs and abortion. The term "separation of state from the church" was hijacked not to mean that government (ran by the people) would be free from the church, but that Baptist/Evangelical groups would be "protected from" the government. It could be easily, although possibly only backed up with anecdotal evidence, contented that most people that joined the "movement" probably didin't understand the fundamental basics of what a deficit is, how it works, how it can be good for the economy.
So it is clear that the Tea Party was founded in Social, not Fiscal conservatism. So how was it that their agenda changed so quickly? Fox News.
It was in Fox News' interest to make this "movement" bigger and bigger, presenting the station as a source of propaganda for followers and a source of amusement/worry for moderates. But the Social Conservatism issue didn't sell. Economics were in vouge. Fox News started to change what the Tea Party were about, something easily done due to the "movement's" lack of hierarchy/structure and in doing so gave them a "reasonable" message. Suddenly the Tea Party weren't Bible bashing nutters, they were concerned fiscal conservatives who were in the moral right. This is what gave the movement a step into political influence.
Politicians started to pander more and more to this "movement" with people like Palin/Bachmann using the guise of "balancing the budget" to disguise their crazy ultra-right wing views, allowing them to seem reasonable, heck even likeable. More traditional republicans, or even Libertarians such as Ron Paul who would be better at balancing the budget suddenly weren't appealing to this "movement" (see: small fringe) and were dropped by the news cycle.
So yes, this America, is how Fox News is killing your country.
Although I already suspect you knew this it was nice for me to sum up the madness that is the GOP.