Racist? 35% of black likely voters identify with Tea Party

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Tea Party movement, however, is the absence of a leadership hierarchy or centralized line of authority. There are thousands of Tea Party groups across America, including several that have established distinct national profiles. As Tea Party Patriots coordinator Mark Meckler told National Journal's Jonathan Rauch, "what we're doing is crowd-sourcing. I use the term 'open-source politics.' This is an open-source movement." Or, to put it in traditional terms, the Tea Partiers are a genuine grass-roots movement whose adherents span much of the political spectrum. "You could do worse than to think of the Tea Party Patriots as a left-wing organization with a right-wing, or at least libertarian, ideology," Rauch said.

And the movement is anything but racially segregated. Thirty-five percent of black likely voters identify with the Tea Party, including 17 percent who strongly identify with it, according to Vic Rubenfeld, director of polling for Pajamas Media TV. As for the liberal Democrats who have attacked it, the latest CNN/Opinion Research poll finds "likely voters say they are considerably more likely to vote for a candidate the president opposes than one he supports. On the other hand, 50 percent of voters said they would be more likely to vote for a Tea Party-backed candidate while a third of Americans said Tea Party support would dissuade their vote for a candidate."

With numbers like that, Obama must wonder what the Tea Partiers know that he doesn't.