Today’s Washington Post has a multi-chapter series on the Republican resurgence, going all the way back before President Obama’s election and culminating in the just-ended fight over raising the debt ceiling. The story is a long tale of how we ended up with the debt deal.

The deal that Boehner and Obama reached obviously didn’t contain enough spending cuts (or enough certain and “real” spending cuts) to put bond-rating agencies at ease. But for conservatives who haven’t been following such things very long and are prone to bash Boehner without nuance, it is worth retelling out the broad point of this Post story: Two powerful forces — a long-term conservative strategy of candidate recruitment and the grassroots fervor of the Tea Parties — have completely changed the nature of the debate in Washington.