The stunning victory of Republican Scott Brown, who will now be the first Republican senator from that state in decades, will now send a strong message to Washington.

Fox News reports that having strong GOP candidates in the election is "90 percent of the game," Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign, said Monday, noting that Scott Brown's U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts has made his job a lot easier these days.

"We've heard from a lot of people who previously said they were not going to run and telling us now they're reconsidering," Cornyn said, adding that "a great range" of high-quality candidates are emerging across the country.

The Democrats and liberals can now no longer ignore the will of the American people who oppose government run health care and the massive deficit spending the Democrats have pushed through in Congress in the last 12 months.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said he opposes a proposal that would require candidates to agree to a set of conservative positions in order to receive party backing.

The proposal, introduced by some of the RNC's more conservative members, would require that candidates publicly state their agreement with at least eight of 10 listed conservative positions -- ranging from taxes and immigration to same-sex marriage and gun control -- or lose party funding and support. Although Steele has not seen the final text of the resolution, named after the late president Ronald Reagan, he is siding with some two dozen state party chairmen who voted unanimously Wednesday to oppose it.
 

According to several reports, frustration is building in the White House press corps over President Obama's lack of news conferences. US News & world Reports says he hasn't held a full-fledged news conference since July (when he made controversial remarks about the arrest of a black professor by a white policeman in Massachusetts), and White House reporters are grumbling about it.

Reporters asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the situation at Gibbs's regular briefings both Friday and Monday, but he said he doesn't know when Obama may face reporters' questions again. 

Obama has given dozens of one-on-one interviews for television, radio and print, and Towson University political science professor Martha Joynt Kumar said presidents tend to favor media exchanges that best suit their particular goals.