Or as Biden would say, the terrorists won.

(ABC News) — As an indication of the role the Tea Party played in the debt debate and changed the conversation on Capitol Hill — the concluding remarks of Reid and McConnell, before the vote in the Senate, focused on the message that the Tea Party has sent.

Moments before the Senate prepared to vote on the debt deal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says this debt ceiling debate will be a template for all future debt ceiling hikes and declared that those conservatives, the Tea Party, won. . .

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., concluded, to counter, that the American people, not the Tea party, are who won in this debate.

“The winners without trying to outline who the winners are, there’s one winner throughout all of this and that’s the American people,” Reid said on the Senate floor, adding that McConnell “boasted” about the Tea Party Senators.

“I welcome them all,” Reid said of the new Tea party Senators, “but as result of the Tea Party direction of this Congress these last few months has been very, very disconcerting and very unfair to the American people.”

Reid said the Tea Party “stopped us from arriving at a conclusion much earlier,” to this problem.