So what won the US midterms - sanity or fear?

Last week almost a quarter of a million Americans converged on The Mall in Washington, DC, and at 20 satellite rallies around the US, to attend the wonderfully named "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" organised by top-flight American political comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

The rally was aimed squarely at the so-called moderate masses of middle America - those who have had enough of what they view as the shrillness and political extremes dominating US politics.

Many came with signs that said it all: "I'm an extreme moderate!", "God hates signs", "Subtlety, now!" and "I might disagree with you so let's have coffee" were among the many highlights. "Medals of Reasonableness" were also handed out to people deemed to have made a contribution to exactly that. It was great stuff.

This event, with its parallel doses of both humour and seriousness, perfectly captures all that's both wonderful and troubling about the American political system as it is today.

That people care enough about their politics to organise and attend a "rally of political moderation" is testimony to the system's strengths. And yet, the fact it was even felt necessary to have the rally in the first place is surely a sign of just how deeply, and some would say irrevocably, divided and off-the-mark the US political elite have become.

Political sanity - at least as I understand it as someone who has worked in and around politics all my adult life - is surely the ability to give some ground, to work with those from across the aisle when it's needed and to deliver policy decisions that marry action and responsibility in fairly equal doses. It's about jettisoning the extremes that isolate so many alternative thinking but reasonable people and it's about appealing to the better, more decent traits that dwell in us all.

Political fear on the other hand is pretty much the opposite of most of the above. It's about tempting our darker natures or manipulating our lack of real life knowledge about some thing or some idea. It's about intentionally conflating genuine and completely legitimate insecurities over keeping your job or paying your bills, with deeper cultural anxieties and then using this mixture for raw political gain.

Political fear is about drawing lines between things that you know really shouldn't have lines drawn between them - all debt equals waste, immigration means crime, race equals difference, Democrat means socialist. You get the point.

And as I watched the pushes and pulls of what drove the almost 250,000 people to the rally last week, I can see one clear candidate for the US embodiment of many aspects of this politics of fear, and that just has to be the populist, hyper-libertarian Tea Party Movement.

Surely this is what most moderates were reacting against when they held up signs calling for dialogue rather than screaming at each other.

OK, Obama hasn't matched the rhetoric of 2008. He has proven, at least by American standards, to be more Left-wing than many expected or would like, and stubbornly high US unemployment has left his Administration struggling on many fronts. So there are grounds for genuine dissappointment.

But the politics of fear mongering, in equal doses with petty ridicule and personal attack, is the Tea Party/Sarah Palin response: "How is that hope-y, change-y stuff working out for you?" she rants, along with a whole lot worse not worth repeating.

And while you don't have the Republican Congressional leadership out there directly claiming Obama is Stalin reincarnate, what did they do to moderate the Tea Party fringe? What did they do for the cause of reasonableness and dialogue? Very little it would seem - they let the fringe loose on the community because they stood to benefit.

So, if that is fear, was there a sanity option?

There are definitely still those who err on the side of genuine policy debate in the US system, and this includes both politicians and members of the public. But of course, because you don't see these people, or even splinter groups of them, out there howling down others in support of for their middle-of-the-road causes, they get much less attention. These people are not out there personally villifying those who think differently from them. But they do exist and many of them ran in the midterms.

So, all in all, there was a decent choice available on Tuesday between sanity and fear.

Which won? Was it sanity by a canter, or did base fear rear its head, breathe its fire and scorch all in its way?

With a few key races left undecided, it seems most likely now that the Democratic side will hold 52 of the 100 Senate seats, keeping control of that chamber, but along the way loosing two-to-one among the 37 seats up this election. Meanwhile, down in the House of Representatives, the Republican side have enjoyed the most significant turn around since World War II, if not before, gaining a majority with 239 seats versus 186 for the Democrats, with a further 10 still up in the air.

And these results are on what may be a midterm record voter turnout of over 41 per cent.

On the face of it then it seems fear won, and if you listen to the Tea Party rhetoric you would be excused for thinking so, but they are wrong.

If we take just one slice of the Republican success story - the list of 24 Republican Senate winners - and dig a little deeper, we actually see a very mixed result when it comes to the Tea Party contribution.

Yes, you have high-profile new Tea Party figures in the Senate like Rand Paul (Kentucky), Marco Rubio (Florida), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania) and Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), but equally, many failed to make the list - think, Sharron Angle who flopped against Democrat Senate Leader Harry Reid in Nevada, the weird and wonderful Christine "I'm Not A Witch" O'Donnell (Delaware) and John Raese (Virginia), along with likely losses in Alaska and Colorado.

The Alaska race is possibly the most telling of all. There you have the extraordinary situation where a "write-in candidate", someone whose name is not even printed on the ballot but who is literally written-in by voters when they're in the booth, is likely to beat the Tea Party candidate (who was on the ballot!). A write-in candidate hasn't won a national race since 1954 and the Alaskan write-in candidate is, wait for it, the moderate Republican the Tea Party defeated in the primary. And remember this is Sarah Palin's home state!

But the real thing with this list of Tea Party disasters is that the non-Democrat side of US politics should have won the lot and probably would have with moderate, run-of-the-mill Republican candidates. If they had, Obama would today be facing a fully Republican Congress.

And the biggest sting in the tail for the Right in America is that it will now probably fall into the Tea Party trap and seriously consider choosing Palin as its 2012 Presidential candidate, pump up the fear factor, and get trounced by the comparatively reasonable and moderate post-midterm remade Obama.

The rise of the Tea Party fear machine seems spectacular but these midterms tell a more complex story when you look a little closer.

I remain a committed optimist about America. It's a beacon of democracy, diversity and debate - and long may that last. It's a society that attracts what we often see as the extremes, but it chews them up and produces a more balanced, sane result. These midterms may yet prove to be another example of exactly that.

This all brings my mind back to another one of those signs at the rally: "Soon enough we'll go back to how should be - Tea Parties are for little girls".