When Virginia Summers joins thousands of other Tea Partiers pledging to restore America's honour at a mega-rally in the capital, she will also be reminding anxious Republicans that the 18-month-old movement that has so upended the U.S. political order is not done with them yet.
"The people I know, I don't think we're going to stop," insisted the 53-year-old housewife from suburban Richmond, Va., whose local Tea Party group is sending 15 busloads of members to Saturday's event. "A lot of us are as unhappy with many of the Republican incumbents as we are with the Democrats. There is just too much government controlling our lives."
It is easy to see why the Republican establishment has been anticipating the Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial - organized by Fox News provocateur Glenn Beck - with a mixture of butterfly-laced excitement and acute indigestion.
Leaderless and idea-challenged, the Republican Party owes its phoenix rise from the post-2008 ashes to the emergence of the Tea Party as the unofficial opposition to President Barack Obama and his Democrats. If the GOP can credibly entertain hopes of winning Congress this fall, it is thanks to a base that has been energized by Tea Party anger and idealism. That enthusiasm will make all the difference in the Nov. 2 midterm vote.
It could also backfire terribly. Though the Tea Party movement has mostly purged its openly bigoted elements, it remains a volatile and undisciplined force. Stoked by Mr. Beck's penchant for pamphleteer politics, Saturday's event could just as easily mobilize Democrats and independent voters disgusted with this unseemly turn in the national conversation.
Such is the ambivalence among GOP leaders that no major Republican other than Sarah Palin has agreed to endorse the rally or participate in it. (Ms. Palin is doing both.) Secretly, at least, top Republicans would like nothing more than to see the Tea Party movement peter out. With the economy sputtering and confidence in the Obama administration waning among white, middle-class voters, the GOP may no longer need the adrenalin rush of the Tea Party to win in November.
For all of the Tea Party's usefulness to the GOP in discrediting the Obama agenda, Republican leaders know their party's identification with the movement could become an obstacle to its longer-term electoral success. Besides, even if Republicans win in November, they know the movement will quickly turn on them when they fail to deliver on its impracticable demands for radically downsized government.
For now, however, the congregations of Americans who have come together in loosely connected local Tea Party chapters, or formed a neighbourhood 9-12 group (vowing homage to the nine principles and 12 values set out by Mr. Beck), are dictating the terms of political debate.
"At the local level, Tea Party and 9-12 groups are managing to move the discussion to the right," notes Andrew Downs, a political science professor at Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Ind. "In districts that are competitive, there will be a more conservative lean than in other years."
This is a crucial point in understanding the midterm election campaign, since the U.S. electoral map largely consists of heavily gerrymandered congressional districts that concentrate Democratic support in urban centres. Republicans do not need to win the popular vote to retake control of the House of Representatives. They just need to sweep 40 of roughly 75 House seats that are truly up for grabs.
In Virginia's 5th Congressional District that spans the south-central part of the state, even first-term incumbent Democrat Tom Periello has been feverishly (and perhaps just as futilely) courting Tea Party support. At a Thursday meeting of the Jefferson Area Tea Party near Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Periello happily agreed with the audience that Mr. Obama's Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, should be fired.
"Let's face it, the guy started out of the gate in a way that was distasteful to a whole lot of us," Mr. Periello conceded in reference to Mr. Geithner's handling of the bank bailouts, economic recovery and his own personal taxes.
If Virginia's 5th is representative of the districts were the Tea Party is likely to crown the winner in November, the movement's influence in state-wide senatorial races could turn out to be a handicap for Republicans.
There is no denying the extraordinary influence of Tea Partiers in knocking off establishment candidates in GOP Senate primaries in six states, even ousting the incumbent senator in Utah. The Tea Party's use of social media to raise money nationally for outlier candidates such as Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada allowed those candidates to take on the GOP machine dollar-for-dollar and win their primaries.
The same phenomenon is unfolding in Alaska, where Palin-backed Tea Party favourite Joe Miller leads incumbent GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski in a primary battle that won't be settled until the last absentee ballots are counted in early September. And even though John McCain prevailed in his Arizona primary this week in spite of a campaign by national Tea Party groups to unseat him, he did so only by veering sharply to the right and spending $23-million (U.S.) - or about $82 per vote.
Mr. McCain and Mr. Miller, should he win his primary, are almost certain to win in the November general election, since they come from heavily Republican states. But choosing the Tea Party candidate to lead the Republican ticket could end up costing the GOP victories in Kentucky and Nevada and Florida. Mr. Paul, Ms. Angle and Marco Rubio in Florida are in tight races in which centrist voters will determine the winner.
Those voters could be turned off by the images of Tea Partiers that could emerge from Saturday's Restoring Honor rally.
The event is billed by Mr. Beck as a tribute to American heroes - military folk and "other upstanding citizens who embody our nation's founding principles of integrity, truth and honor."
On his Web page devoted to the gathering, the one-man media conglomerate, whose right-wing indignation is criticized by some as simply a money-making gimmick, continues: "Our freedom is possible only if we remain virtuous. Help us restore the values that founded this great nation,"
If it sounds patriotic, Mr. Beck's decision to hold the rally on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington, where he delivered his inimitable "I Have a Dream" speech, has many Republicans smelling a rat. Mr. Beck calls the timing "divine providence." Black leaders call it a provocation. Rev. Al Sharpton is holding an event to commemorate the Dream speech, followed by a march to the site of the planned King memorial. Participants from the two events will inevitably cross paths.
Mr. Beck vows to use his event to "reclaim the civil rights movement." It is a goal that resonates with many Tea Partiers. Mr. Beck and his ilk equate "equal rights" with individual responsibility and self-reliance. They question government programs aimed at helping the poor or minorities. They accuse liberals of twisting the constitutional meaning of equality to justify income redistribution and affirmative action.
No wonder Republican leaders have been awaiting Saturday with trepidation. They are grateful, at least, that Mr. Beck has asked participants to refrain from displaying signs at the event. As long as they co-operate, there should be no footage of angry Tea Partiers wielding placards with racist slogans for Democrats to use in fall campaign ads.
But if establishment Republicans would rather it just all go away, Ms. Summers has news for them. She'll not stay quiet until or even after November. And neither will Mr. Beck.
Konrad Yakabuski