Teabaggers Unite!

Good story on the recent tea parties to protest government spending. Its hard to condense this into a couple of key points, but here is a reasonable try:

This was not a typical conservative Republican rally, with local GOP activists, Ron Paul enthusiasts, and single-issue obsessives. (Those folks always show up—and they did in Atlanta.) The difference was the new people: Young hipsters, families, angry moms, and retirees alike left their normal routines and work obligations to show up in protest of government policies that they passionately believe will ruin what is unique about America. ...
Did the tea parties matter? One reasonable measure of progress may be the sheer volume of vitriol produced by their critics. ...
In the long run, the faces I saw in Atlanta represent a potentially potent new constituency for fiscal discipline and government restraint. Compositionally, this is the same voting block that showed up to vote for the very first time in 1994 in reaction to the big government overreaches of the Clinton Administration, throwing House Democrats out after 40 years of policy hegemony.
I don't believe that the official Republican apparatus can effectively organize these voters for 2010. Indeed, the very nature of the tea parties defies top-down direction. The protests, just like the free market process they tacitly espoused, were decentralized and driven by voluntary action. But as Saul Alinsky might tell you, activists need to stay active. Many of the most effective organizations and community leaders that emerged from the tea party movement have already gathered behind a March on Washington on September 12, 2009. Other efforts will add more structure to the tea party communities, and perhaps target some grassroots pressure towards particular politicians during specific legislative battles over socialized health care, higher spending, and other big government schemes.

I wish them well and agree that the answer, at least not today, is the Republican Party. In fact, the biggest danger that these activists have is that they will be taken over by Republicans, who will distort and destroy the key messages that they are trying to promote.