All tea'd off, but then what?

The (expanded, updated, tweaked, nipped, and tucked) Sunday print column:

They spoke to me about the downfall of America, with fear burning in their eyes. It was vintage "tea party" talk, the kind of stuff we're hearing every day.

C.A. Alexander, a businessman who looks like an airline pilot, said, "We're just feeling helpless. I get paranoid about the future of our country." Ralph Leatherman, a worker in bib overalls, said, "Our country's gone, it's just gone." Orville Capes, a plumber, lamented, "We're losing this country without fighting the battle." But they agreed it was time to fight hard and take the country back; as retired Navy vet R.W. Phillips said, "I never wanted to be a protester or activist or political person. The system has forced me to become everything I didn't want to be."

Well, guess what: Those fed-up folks were all planning to vote for a third-party candidate named Ross Perot. I conducted those interviews down in North Carolina...in 1992.

In other words, there is nothing particularly novel about the "tea partiers" who this past weekend staged their first national convention. (Although many boycotted the event, which speaks volumes about the movement's fractiousness.) For nearly 200 years, grassroots populist anger - directed at Washington, Wall Street, the elites in general - has flared up and flamed out. Most of the time, the anger begats a movement, which in turn becomes co-opted by the two major parties, or simply implodes from within.

It's too soon to say whether the diffuse and leaderless tea-partiers will play a significant role in the '10 congressional races. As evidenced by the latest CNN poll, the movement is still a work in progress: 33 percent of Americans view it positively, 26 percent view it negatively, and 40 percent have never heard of it or have no opinion. Moreover, as mentioned here previously, the movement failed an electoral test on Tuesday night, when two tea party-backed candidates were crushed in the Illinois Republican primaries.

A a big tea party role in November '10 is certainly quite possible; after all, the movement is currently in its ascendent flare-up phase, united under the banner of inchoate anger. On the other hand, the movement has more cliques than a high school, and the infighting is already fierce. As Jim Knapp, a prominent tea party activist remarked on CNN the other day, "I don't think the tea party knows what's happening to the tea party."

The tea partiers' angst about America is sincere, and their panic is real. But Ross Perot's populists had similar sentiments, and we all know what happened there. Perot drew 19 percent of the vote in '92, mostly from voters fed up with the two major parties (especially the incumbent Republicans). Then he created the Reform party. The party devolved so badly that in 2000, after years of internecine warfare, it wound up putting Pat Buchanan on the ballot, thereby trimming its vote share to 0.4 percent.

Could the tea partiers create a political party? Heck, at this point they can't even agree on a hotel party.

A group called Tea Party Nation sponsored the first-ever convention, at a swanky Nashville hotel. The problem was that Tea Party Nation was charging a $549 admission fee, and cash-strapped tea partiers felt this exploitative profiteering violated the principle of fiscal conservatism. They also deemed it tacky that keynoter Sarah Palin was paid $100,000 to give the kind of speech that politicians have traditionally delivered for free in front of political audiences since the dawn of the republic.

All told, Tea Party Nation's speaker list was so woefully thin that it wound up giving an opening night slot to nativist ranter Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who contended in his speech that Barack Obama was elected by "people who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English." He insisted that voters be subjected to a literacy test; as some of us well recall, literacy tests were once utilized in the South to keep blacks out of the voting booth. Did Tea Party Nation really think that it would be wise to kick off the movement's first convention by spreading a racist stench?

But the biggest problem is that Tea Party Nation doesn't even speak for the movement. In fact, nobody does. Not Tea Party Patriots or Tea Party Emporium. Not Tea Party Express or National Precinct Alliance. Not Campaign for Liberty or FreedomWorks. Not American Majority or American Liberty Alliance. Somebody should put numbers on their uniforms and give us a scorecard, although I did determine that American Liberty Alliance and America Majority reneged on their agreements to sponsor the weekend convention with Tea Party Nation - which is publicly lamenting "the divisions that are already hurting this movement." And I believe that Tea Bag Emporium is the huckster operation that sells onyx jewelry in the shape of a tea bag for $89.99 - thus prompting me to recall the great line penned by the late writer Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

Some of those tea party groups, as well as hundreds of local affiliates and offshoots, are genuinely bottom up. But some of those groups are top down — in other words, they're fake grassroots. They're "Astroturf" groups fronting for big business and the Republican party. FreedomWorks is a Washington operation run by ex-GOP House insider Dick Armey, who is bankrolled by his corporate clients. (On the one hand, FreedomWorks rails against the federal bailout of Wall Street; on the other hand, Armey's lobbying firm represented AIG and Lehman Brothers - which sought the federal bailout of Wall Street.) Meanwhile, Tea Party Express is run by a pair of veteran California Republican strategists, who reportedly have steered tea party donations into their consulting firm - a practice that has inspired some Tea Party Patriots to assail Tea Party Express as "the Astroturf Express."

Still with me on all this?

We're not just talking here about a flow chart that looks like Jackson Pollock art. We're talking about some fundamental tensions between tea-partiers and the Republican party.

On paper, at least, the GOP seems well positioned to benefit from tea-party ire, since the incumbent Democrats are stuck with the budget deficit and the downside of governance in tough times. But tea-party populism is more nuanced than that. Some of the grassroots anger is directed at Wall Street and the big banks - and the GOP, as the party of big business, has long been perceived as being in bed with both.

Tea-partiers typically rail, in somewhat scattershot fashion, against "special interest money," yet they link many of these interests (particularly the corporate variety) with the GOP. When establishment Republicans cheered the recent Supreme Court ruling that freed up corporate political spending, tea-partiers denounced it; writing online, Houston-based tea-partier Dale Robertson contended that the decision favoring "these behemoth organizations...puts the people at a tremendous disadvantage."

Clearly, it won't be easy for Republicans to simply capture and absorb the movement. Shane Brooks, a Texas-based tea party activist recently posted some advice to his brethren in a YouTube video: "We must not allow the tea parties...to be hijacked by the GOP." Kevin Smith, a Nashville-based activist, recently lamented online that the movement could be "co-opted by mainstream Republican demagogues (who are) determined to use this as their 2010 election platform."

Sarah Palin, in her Saturday night remarks to the tea party audience in Nashville, tried to play it both ways. On the one hand, she suggested during the brief Q & A period that it would be swell if the GOP co-opted the movement: "The Republican Party would be really smart to start trying to absorb as much of the tea party movement as possible, because this is the future of our country." On the other hand, she praised the movement for being bottom-up and independent-minded: "You don't need an office or a title to make a difference, and you don't need a proclaimed leader, as if we are all a bunch of sheep and looking for a leader to progress this movement." Brooks and Smith, the aforementioned activists, and so many of their comrades, are indeed opposed to being led like sheep into the Republican camp, precisely because they dislike the party's Wall Street allies.

So what do all these tea partiers like, anyway? It's a cinch to see what they're against (big government, big deficits, big banks, big corporations, big bigness, both major parties, and often other tea partiers). It's tougher to see what they're for (perhaps a kinder, gentler America that may or may not have existed). And that's the rub. A populist movement needs an affirmative agenda; otherwise, the fire generally tends to flicker out.

As one disgruntled gent put it, "There's so many people out there looking for something, but they're not sure what it is they're looking for." So said Perot voter Ray Harbin, when he and I conversed 18 years ago. Plus ca change...