ShareThisWASHINGTON - Political scientists will tell you that American protest movements typically come and go. Adherents can't sustain their indignation indefinitely. Sooner or later, the source of their grievances dries up.
But what if it's a geyser?
For members of the bustling U.S Tea Party movement, which approaches its first birthday this month, the past year has provided a gusher to get galled about. The behemoth bank bailouts, epic expenditures by government and an impenetrable, state-led plan to reform health care chafe them still.
As hundreds of Tea Party organizers arrived in Nashville Thursday for their first national "convention," they were ready to draw on new wells of outrage with the $1.6-trillion budget deficit that President Barack Obama announced this week and reports that state ward AIG is preparing to pay another $100-million in executive bonuses.
But the event, which has itself been the subject of protest by some Tea Partiers, is also a test to see whether the movement that emerged from last year's ad-hoc anti-bailout and anti-health-care-reform rallies can move beyond its petulant adolescence to become a venerable force in U.S. politics.
Factional infighting, power struggles at the top and resistance from many Tea Partiers to the institutionalization of their movement -- and to its co-opting by the Republican Party -- are threatening to drown out the real message they want politicians to hear: The American government has overstepped its bounds.
Or, as Sarah Palin recently put it: "Government, you have constitutional limits. You better start abiding by them."
Palin is the star of the Nashville convention, which aims to provide Tea Party organizers from across the country with the skills and savvy needed to translate their enthusiasm into influence at the ballot box.
Were it not for Palin's imprimatur, the convention might have degenerated into a vaudevillian bust. And it still could. Several competing Tea Party groups pulled out of the event, purportedly over its "for-profit" status, steep $550 registration fee and the less-than-reassuring credentials of TPN founder Judson Phillips. Phillips, a suburban Nashville lawyer specializing in drunk-driving cases, declared personal bankruptcy in 1999 and recently owed $22,000 in back taxes.
The ability to use new technology to fire up folks who hadn't previously paid much attention to politics used to belong to Obama. But the post-election Organizing for America campaign launched online by Obama strategist David Plouffe has been largely considered a flop.
Instead, it's the Tea Party movement that is now harnessing social media the most effectively.
"The Tea Party could not have mounted a convention so early without the Internet," Ross Baker a political science professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said in an interview. "People who once tried to stir up opposition to government policy with pamphlets and radio advertisements can do it now with a few mouse clicks."
It's not just Democrats who are worried about that. The Republican establishment is petrified that GOP candidates who aren't up to ideological snuff could find themselves in three-way races with Democrats and independent candidates backed by Tea Partiers. That's what happened in November. Democrats won a normally solid Republican district in New York State after the Tea Partiers backed the conservative candidate, splitting the vote on the right.
If the modern-day Tea Partiers can get past their suspicion of each other they might change the course of U.S. history. We'll have a better idea after Nashville.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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