Does Anyone Have a Grip on the G.O.P.? Photograph of cutouts by Victor Schrager for The New York Times. Politician photographs: Julio Cortez/Associated Press (Huntsman); Joe Raedle/Getty Images (Gingrich and Perry); Chris O'Meara/Associated Press (Cain, Bachmann, Santorum); Scott Audette/Reuters (Romney); Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank via Associated Press (Paul); Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press (Palin); Matt Rainey (Christie). The G.O.P. elite tries to take its party back. It wasn't that long ago that Republican moneymen and operatives in Washington were moping around K Street like Eeyore in the Hundred Acre Wood, lamenting their party's extremist image and casting about for a candidate with a chance of beating Barack Obama in 2012. Citing what he called the "near self-immolation" of House Republicans during the debt-ceiling fiasco, Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, worried in early August that a "large number of Republican primary voters, and even more independent general-election voters, will be wary of supporting a Republican candidate in 2012 if the party looks as if it's in the grip of an infantile form of conservatism." But a few months of obstinate unemployment can change a lot in Washington, and these days the mood inside the Republican establishment is, if not quite smug, then certainly relieved. In a slideshow widely circulated among Republicans in recent weeks, one of the party's leading pollsters, Bill McInturff, noted that the consumer-confidence index (as measured by the University of Michigan and Thomson Reuters), had fallen in August to a score of 55.7. No president, McInturff pointed out, has ever been re-elected with an index score lower than 75. Around this time in 1979, as Jimmy Carter, the modern standard setter for failed presidents, was preparing to seek a second term, the index was at 64.5. Given such fast-deteriorating conditions, many Republican veterans have come around to the view that they aren't really going to need the perfect presidential candidate, and perhaps not even a notably good one. With Chris Christie having taken himself out of the running - again - earlier this month, the field of candidates now appears to be pretty much set, and none of them are likely to inspire any reimaginings of Mount Rushmore. But maybe all the moment requires is someone who can pass as a broadly acceptable alternative - a candidate who doesn't project the Tea Party extremism of Michele Bachmann or the radical isolationism of Ron Paul. "If we have a Rick Perry versus Mitt Romney battle for the nomination, it's a little hard to say, "Ooh, the party has really gone off the rails," " Kristol told me just after Perry entered the race, a development that essentially ended Bachmann's brief ascent. Establishment Republicans may prefer Romney to Perry, but their assumption is that either man can be counted on to steer the party back toward the broad center next fall, effectively disarming the Tea Party mutiny. If that's the case, then it now seems like only a matter of time before the Republican empire, overwhelmed by insurrection for much of the last two years, strikes back at last. "I think it's waning now," Scott Reed, a veteran strategist and lobbyist, told me when we talked about the Tea Party's influence last month. Efforts to gin up primaries next year against two sitting senators - Utah's Orrin Hatch and Indiana's Dick Lugar - have been slow to gain momentum, Reed said, and it's notable that more than half of the 50-plus members of the Tea Party caucus in the House ultimately fell in line and voted with Speaker John Boehner on his debt-ceiling compromise. Party leaders have managed to bleed some of the anti-establishment intensity out of the movement, Reed said, by slyly embracing Tea Party sympathizers in Congress, rather than treating them as "those people." Did he mean to say that the party was slowly co-opting the Tea Partiers? "Trying to," Reed said. And that's the secret to politics: trying to control a segment of people without those people recognizing that you're trying to control them. As I made the rounds of Republican Washington in recent weeks and reflected on all this newfound optimism, though, I found myself recalling what Ken Mehlman, who managed George W. Bush's re-election campaign in 2004, liked to say back then: "Hope is not a strategy." It's not clear which of those two things - hope or strategy - the Republican establishment is really embracing. After all, in September, not long after I saw Reed, far-right Republicans staged another successful mutiny in the House, temporarily blocking a spending bill that Boehner had championed. Meanwhile, the "supercommittee" of lawmakers created by the debt-ceiling legislation is supposed to find more budget cuts by the end of the year, which means Washington faces another very public showdown. The deficit debate in Congress could easily dominate the campaign season, complicating the party's election-year message and making it hard for any nominee to unify pragmatic insiders and Tea Party outsiders. Correction: October 16, 2011 An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to a prescription-drug bill passed in 2003 under President George W. Bush and mentioned as an example of a "nuanced view" of the government's role. It was for Medicare recipients, not Medicaid. The article also misidentified a state described as part of the Rust Belt. It is Michigan, not Missouri. The article also misstated the type of election in Florida last year in which a candidate rejected in a Republican primary went on to run as an independent. It was for the United States Senate, not for the governorship. Correction: October 30, 2011 An article on Oct. 16 about the struggle to control the Republican Party misstated the type of election in Florida last year in which a candidate rejected in a Republican primary went on to run as an independent.