Tea Party Crashers: While the Movement Boasts of Independence, It is Little More Than a Gop Adjunct: Loud, Colorful, But Still Advancing the Establishment's Ends (Elephant in the Room) (Republican Party)

JUDY PEPENELLA, co-director of New York's Tea Party Patriots, insists that she has just blown my mind. "It's 'We the People'," she repeats. "That's the Tea Party--those three silly words: We. The. People." She says it's impossible to explain to an outsider, even a sympathetic one. "It doesn't make any sense, but it makes all the sense in the world. In Massachusetts the people put out the call, and we helped Scott Brown. And no one can figure us out." Pepenella may not be able to define the Tea Party appeal, but she has the ingredients right. It is loud, self-regarding, incoherent, and endowed with a bottomless confidence that it speaks for real Americans. It sounds just like Republicans did circa 1994.