US shutdown: Most see political wreckage, but the Tea Party is convinced that it won American Way

With cracked voice and snow-white goatee, the veteran of six Second World War naval clashes narrows his eyes towards a distant horizon, his face full of unspoken memories. Redge Ranyard, 90, turns to address a camera and quotes John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, characterising the US government shutdown as an "epic battle" with Barack Obama.

"I was in six epic battles fighting the Nazis," he says, in dignified rage. "Congressman, your shutdown is not an 'epic battle', it is bad governance. I served this nation with honour; today I can't say the same of most Republicans in Congress." In a country that lionises its veterans like no other, those were wounding words and they are just one example of how completely the Republican Party lost the public relations war last week over who was primarily responsible for Washington's latest damaging budget stand-off.

Thanks to television advertisements like that one from VoteVets.org and the near-constant barrage of criticism against Tea Party "extremists" from Obama in his presidential bully pulpit, the Republican Party saw its national approval rating sink to 28 per cent in one Gallup survey - the lowest recorded for a US political party since records began in 1992. It would seem, then, absolutely clear who the winners and losers were in the 16-day government shutdown that Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, scorned as a "$24 billion temper tantrum" by the Tea Party.

Obama was also clear that those Tea Party Republicans who had demanded concessions on the Obamacare health reforms - but won nothing at all by the time Mr Boehner finally threw in the towel on Wednesday night - had been taught a salutary lesson. "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position," the president scolded, sounding like a mother teaching a toddler to "use their words" instead of lashing out blindly. "Go out there and win an election. Push to change it but don't break it." John McCain, an old-school moderate Republican senator who is despised by Tea Party types, openly agreed with the president, chiding his party on CNN to "stop this foolish childishness" and start working out how to win votes and improve people's lives. "The president won," he added, "I give him credit, he won."

What McCain could have added was "and I told you so" - along with the rest of the Republican establishment in Washington, from the Senate leadership to the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. All had predicted that the Tea Party's stand over Obamacare would end in defeat and cause further damage to the credibility of both the Republicans and the United States. But the conservative kids don't quite see it like that. On the contrary, the Tea Party faction with Ted Cruz - a slick-haired freshman senator from Texas - as their newly appointed talisman, are jubilant that finally someone took a principled stand against the feckless Washington consensus that has allowed the US debt mountain to reach nearly $17 trillion.

The hard core conservative base is treating Cruz like a political rock star, handing him victory in the Conservative Values Voter straw poll and adding two million new names to his fundraising lists. Far from lancing the boil in the latest iteration of the long-running battle between pragmatists and purists in the Republican Party - think Taft v Eisenhower, Goldwater v Rockefeller, Reagan v Ford - this latest episode has only added to the pressure. Sarah Palin, another triumph of populism over policy, was whipping up the faithful within hours of John Boehner signalling his final surrender, promising to "shake things up in 2014".

"From sea to shining sea we will not give up. We've only just begun to fight," she wrote on Facebook, promising the Tea Party would field challengers to establishment Republican candidates in forthcoming Senate and House races. "The way forward is to elect leaders who will listen to us... Let's commit to continue to be in the trenches fighting for those who stand on principle over politics, despite the odds." Such are the divisions in the GOP, that there is now open talk among Conservative bloggers and radio talk-show hosts of "divorce" and the formation of a "third party" that would be unsullied by compromise.

As a symptom of this internal divide, outside groups such as the Senate Conservatives Fund (a top donor to Cruz) now spend more of their money trying to unseat Republicans who don't pass their ideology tests than they do attacking Democrats. Jeffrey Lord, a former political aide in the Reagan White House, says the structure of US politics makes a split both unlikely and futile but adds that the Conservative base genuinely believes it is fighting to save America.

"From the view of a lot of people in the base... the Washington establishment isn't dealing with this debt problem," he says, "These people really do see a Great Depression scenario forming here." To liberals these Tea Partiers - mostly white, middle-aged and wondering why the world no longer pays Americans the living its once did - are the last vestiges of old America.

Modern Washington is where all three factions - Mr Obama's Democrats, the Republican establishment and the Tea Party insurgents - can survey the political wreckage of last week's stand-off and find reasons to convince themselves they won. Unfortunately that means last week's "deal" was not a treaty but a last-minute, temporary truce signed only when all sides were confronted with the mutually assured destruction of the first debt default in US history.

The ink was not even dry before Republicans were gearing up to fight other Republicans and Obama was soon back in his bully pulpit, accusing Cruz and the Tea Party "patriots" of being traitors to America's cause. All of which means that America's grinding political conflict is far from over. The date for the next battle - January 15, 2014, when the new US government funding authority expires - has already been set.