This has been a bad couple of months for the Right. Nowhere is that truer than in the calamitous turn the discussion of the new ObamaCare mandate took last week.

After the administration announced it was going to compel employers to include contraception in their health-care coverage, the furor over the assault on religious freedom this move represented (for Catholic institutions in particular) was deeply worrying to the administration.

The White House concocted a face-saving and insufficient gloss on its policy to try to calm things down. But it appeared it had lost ground and given Republicans a political gift of a kind.

But then the right blew it, in part because presidential candidate Rick Santorum bizarrely introduced contraception into the GOP primary season by telling a blogger in October that “one of the things that I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.”

That stray remark was the necessary precondition for a rising argument that Republicans were declaring war on women and sex.

A bonehead scheduling decision by a House committee on the new mandate led to an official hearing at which only conservative males testified (“Sorry. Too late,” said a committee staffer when Democrats proposed a female panelist to speak) — which became an instant and highly promotable cause celebre.

And when liberals held their own hearing days later, featuring law student Sandra Fluke making wild claims about the cost of contraception, conservatives went more than a little nuts.

Rush Limbaugh sought to use Fluke’s calculations against her in a failed effort at ridiculing her claims by suggesting the only way anyone could spend that much on birth control would be if she were a slut or a prostitute.

The gasps of outrage that greeted Limbaugh’s use of uncalled-for and insulting language were hilariously hypocritical, coming from people who failed to be the least troubled by similar stuff said about conservative women like Laura Ingraham, S.E. Cupp and Sarah Palin.

Still, Limbaugh, who apologized eloquently both online and over the air, made a classic error that helps explain how the right lost control of the argument.

He punched down — went after someone smaller than he.

It’s one thing if Limbaugh’s target, and the target of the general ire of the right, is the president or other prominent politicians and entertainers or the Democratic Party writ large.

But while 30-year-old “gender activist” Sandra Fluke may not be the simple wet-behind-the-ears just-out-of-college “law student” the media and President Obama made her out to be, she ain’t no Rush Limbaugh.

Fights over social policy always have to do with the idea that the powerful are imposing their beliefs unjustly on the less powerful. That was the fight the right was winning with the ObamaCare mandate — that the powerful central government was using unjust force.

That got turned around on the right, with liberals pushing forward the view that conservatives are using their power to insult and injure and take freedoms away from women. Sandra Fluke became the representative woman, bullied by Limbaugh, who was standing in for all conservatives and Republicans.

Conservatives got their hats handed to them in part due to overconfidence about the political value of their attack and excessive certitude about how right they were on the issue. That’s an important lesson for them as this election year progresses.

But while there is a conservative echo chamber that can silence exterior views, it’s the size of an indoor-tennis court, compared to the liberal echo chamber, which is the size of the Astrodome. Conservatives will always have difficulty with excessive and blinding triumphalism, because the mainstream media will always be there to challenge them.

But the almost berserk triumphalist glee of liberals and the left as a result of their success has very little resistance, given the degree of scorn they have toward those who oppose them. Having won this hand, they may begin to feel they can’t lose, and so they may begin to play recklessly and foolishly.

They did win this hand. But they can lose. They just can’t help fooling themselves into believing they can’t. It’s a preexisting condition.