The Left's pundits think that Rove is behind the Frist/Bush crusade. The Left's political insiders think that DeLay is behind it.
The truth of the matter is that Frist was chosen to replace Lott because the Republican leadership was and is mad at the one-sided anti-GOP news media coverage that lets the Democrats attack our guys for the slightest misstep (Lott told a one-line joke, once, at a birthday party for Thurmond, and that cost him his job)...and because Frist was the meanest, smartest Senator with Republican seniority.
And this really follows the grassroots pattern that we've seen since 1994. Our country keeps electing harder-Right politicians, in ever-larger numbers, year after year for the past decade.
You know, pre-9/11, back in 2000, GWB was the most Right Presidential candidate who could have possibly been elected at that time.
Now our nation has moved far enough to the Right that you actually hear the far Right bashing Bush for sometimes not being conservative and cowboy-enough!
Man, the voters of America today would have labeled President Nixon as a freaking left-wing Rino with his opening up of China, founding the EPA, wage and price controls, pulling out of Vietnam, etc... yet until GWB came along, Nixon was regarded as the farthest to the Right that an elected American President could get!
This trend will only get better. The Baby Boom generation is 4 years from being old enough to get Social Security, and each year more and more of them are becoming first time grandparents (the *most* conservative demographic age).
Technology will show that mothers are carrying babies, not tissue, so abortion will be killed off as a Democratic position (pun intended), and Democrats have already given up on gun control after we've handed them ten straight years of defeats over that point.
So on isssue after issue, the Right stands to win, win, and win again and again and again.
...And Americans like winners. The more that the Right wins, the more Americans will join our side. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
Life is good.