Gingrich: Will 2010 become the year of the Tea Party?

As we enter the New Year, one of the most interesting questions is whether the Tea Party movement was a temporary outburst of anger or the beginning of a fundamental reform movement that may change America. Recent polls indicating that a "Tea Party Party" would be more popular than the Republican Party are a signal of the depth of potential support for a truly radical movement of government reform. Many Americans feel threatened by the radicalism of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine. There is a much deeper anger in America than the media elites or the Democrats in Congress and the White House understand. Furthermore, the constant effort to belittle the citizens who are moving decisively against the left-wing establishment (including those parts of the Republican Party that are seen as associated with that establishment of the left) is only increasing this anger. The fact is that gathering together to petition Congress and to protest bad policies is a right that goes back to the very beginning of the country. Having sent a number of petitions to the British government in London and gotten more troops and more repression in response, the colonists finally felt themselves compelled to rebel. It took years of British arrogance, repression and mismanagement to sufficiently infuriate the British colonists into breaking away to become American citizens. The Republicans forgot their reform background (going back to both Reagan and the 1994 Contract with America) and were punished in 2006 and 2008...read more