The Tea Party movement can be a political tiger that, if you don’t stay on board, can eat you. In many ways it demands policy commitments that are at cross purposes to those of lobbyists and donators, who have business stakes in who gets elected and the funding of major projects for new roads, bridges, high speed rail, electrical transmission lines, alternate energy plants, etc. Someone who is a natural hypocrite, like John Edwards, might be able to say things to get Tea Party support while catering to the donators, but a politician of integrity would end up disappointing either the formal infrastructure of his or her party or the Tea Party groups on several issues. The kind of policy wonks who believe they can make government work better are almost philosophically orthogonal to the Tea Party movement, that is premised on the belief that NO government program is better than the best government program.

There is a strong correlation between the home schooling movement and the Tea Party movement. Home schooling is a way to rebel against the big bureaucracy educational establishment that takes so much of government tax revenue and is seen as more an more intrusive on the parent-child relationship, preempting the parental prereogative of teaching sexual morality, among other things. The home schooling movement relies on a network of people who share information about how to get curriculum material and beat the educational bureaucracies of each state. It is largely families who see government as too greedy and too intrusive. And the social networks forged through home schooling have been among the nerve lines used to create the Tea Parties.

If the Tea Party movement continues as a viable force, I can foresee one of its issues being an attack on the notion that only public schools can be funded with education taxes. As more parents see themselves as doing the job they are paying the state to do, they are going to demand a share of the revenues the state collects to pay for the education they provide their own children, or at least to be relieved of the burden of taxes to support other people’s kids. If a mother received the full public funding that the state spends on education for each child, a family with three children could get $30,000 to $45,000 a year in some states, more than enough to replace most of the jobs that mothers take outside the home. When you figure in the cost of child care and transportation and other costs of working outside the home, plus taxes collected, staying home to teach your own children would then be an attractive financial option for any family with more than two children. But of course, the political structure that is tied to public education and teacher unions, as well as the sheer political power that comes with the control of school budgets, creates a conflict between the political establishment and a real grass-roots movement that expresses the goals of individual families. And similar conflicts make the notion of straddling a traditional political party with one foot, and the Tea Party movement with the other, a daunting proposition for anyone who truly feels obligated to fulfill the expectations of his or her supporters.

I don’t think Romney is temperamentally suited to be a leader of the Tea Party movement; he is a highly intelligent person who sees government as an instrument that can be used to solve problems. I think his tendency is to look for ways to make government work, rather than conclude that government can only make things worse. The fact that he succeeds at doing that makes it less likely that he would make a philosophical commitment to the Tea Party doctrine that less government is automatically better than more government.

On the other hand, Sarah Palin is positioned to be able to use the Tea Party movement, precisely because she is an outsider to the core of the traditonal Republican Party. She sacrifices far less than Romney if she becomes the official spokesperson of the Tea Baggers.

The two approaches can be identified with two participants in the American Revolution. John Adams of Massachusetts was a revolutionary because he believed in traditional values and the rights of Englishmen. Sam Adams was more willing to encourage the chaotic approach to opposing British rule. Romney is more like John, Palin more like Sam.