The meeting room of the local public library was full to bursting, 70 in all: in addition to those sitting in chairs around long tables, attendees spilled over onto steps and stood around the periphery of the room. The program began with the leader, Mrs. W, declaring in a booming voice, "Welcome, patriots! There are thousands of us—millions of us!" The room beheld her, spellbound. "What’s happening is scaring me," she confided, "so I’m glad you’re here so we can do something about it." There was no applause, just silence.

A projector had been set up in the center of the room with internet access via a laptop, and there was some delay while Mrs. W’s son, who was running the audio-visual component of the program, put it into working order. A few more minutes of awkward silence passed as Mrs. W looked out expectantly over the crowd, which sat patiently while her son fumbled with the laptop, crashing it and restarting it at least twice. Filling in the time, Mrs. W introduced herself as an elementary school teacher and said, "I don’t know what you’ve been told, but the news is really not the news and reports things that aren’t true. Fox Newsand The New York Timesreport that Tea Partiers are more educated than average and have a higher household income than average, so enjoy." These facts were savored in continuing silence.

Finally Mrs. W's son managed to get the video started. Entitled "We the People," it was presented as an open letter to President Obama defining the platform of the Tea Party movement. It was long on crowd-pleasing "patriotic" images of the Statue of Liberty, a scowling bald eagle, mud-caked soldiers, and flapping American flags, but short on substance (though every word of the spoken narration appeared across the top of the frame like operatic supertitles). When it was over, the crowd applauded warmly, its first apparent visceral reaction of the evening.

Mrs. W then read the following quote from a Tea Party gathering she had attended the previous week: "We are people who are watching the elephant and the donkey tread on the eagle." No clear attribution was given, though it had the effect of eliciting vigorous nods from the audience. Mrs. W continued, "I read the Constitution, and I’m not sure I understand a lot of it." More nods--the group was with her. She then read from the Presidential Oath of Office, " '. . . preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.' They’re not doing that!" she declared. "Now I want to move on to health care." She said that health care reform (though she did not specify whether she was referring to its current state or to the embattled public option) would result in government-funded "abortions for illegal immigrants and forced participation in abortion by professionals in the medical profession." She said that Democrats would try to use some type of wording that was already in the Constitution to claim that abortion was understood to be a constitutional right. While she was saying this, there was a rustle of paper from the back of the room.

"Wait, I got it!" yelled a man triumphantly who had been frantically looking up the quote in question. "The preamble!" He read, " 'We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Untied States of America.' That’s what they’ll say it is: promoting the general welfare!"

"What’ll they do next, make you buy a GM car ‘cause the government owns it?" chimed in another man. The room tittered with laughter.

Linda leaned gravely over her lectern and intoned, "This is not about health care. It’s about seizing rights!" Briskly, she then moved on to introduce a web site called www.icaucus.org in which candidates for state government are presented with questions designed to reveal how closely they agree with the Constitution. If they score over 70 on the test, the Tea Party movement will endorse them. Linda explained: "What they do is, they vet—now, I didn’t know what this means, but it means that they question—and I’m assuming most of you don’t know what this means, either—they VET the candidates by asking them questions about the Constitution." Everywhere heads nodded, strenuously soaking in new and complicated information.

A man standing against the wall, M, spoke up. "The most important elections are the primaries—this is where we get rid of the incumbents." An animated discussion about the role of lobbyists followed, with the bombshell dropped that lobbyist money is pumped back into the system, creating a, a, system where, the money, you know, goes right back into more lobbying (a self-perpetuating cash flow machine, I thought helpfully, but my telepathy must have been out of range). M concluded, "Stimulus money is being used to buy power, not help people." Another man spoke up relevantly: "That’s why we need to get rid of the income tax!"

It was time to see another video (unfortunately, I don't have a link to this one). More fumbling with the laptop ensued, and this time it proved to be an impossible task to raise the volume beyond a stage whisper. Mrs. W's son turned to the crowd and announced the solution: "Everybody be quiet!" This video showed how companies give nearly equal amounts of money to both Republican and Democratic candidates. It was also supertitled, and the graphics were halting and woefully literal (a declaration that a point was a "red herring" was accompanied by a ClipArt shot of a blood-red fish). The takeaway: Republicans and Democrats are more politically united than they are divided. More applause.

M spoke again. "Congress never votes on earmarks, doesn’t even know where they come from." There was a brief derisive discussion on earmarks, a sin of both parties which the Tea Party will not tolerate. But then the question arose: What exactly is the Tea Party?

"We’re not talking about a third party, are we?" piped up another man.

"No," said Linda. "If candidates aren’t willing to be vetted—QUESTIONED—don’t even look at them." As an example, she pointed to the name of an Indiana candidate officially endorsed by icaucus.org: "Vote for HIM—he has voted against EVERYTHING! He sticks to the Constitution!" She was referring to Mike Pence.

Another man from the audience spoke up. "I’d just like to comment. You know it’s a serious meeting when you see all these women here. Because nothing gets done unless the women give permission. So I’d just like to thank all the women here." Much applause, laughter, chatter, and batting of eyelashes by all but two of the women in attendance.

Mrs. W's son took a break from wrestling with the projector to comment that the Tea Party movement is actually an umbrella group for all like-minded local independent groups such as this one, though news coverage might not portray it that way. His mother chimed in: "Fox News—that’s the only way you can get any REAL information." Murmurs of agreement rose throughout the room.

A man stood up, brandishing two paperback books. "These should be recommended reading," he said.

" ‘The Communist Manifesto’ by Karl Marx" (he was received here by whispers of concern) "and 'Rules for Radicals’ by Saul Alinsky." Linda’s son dutifully typed out the titles and authors on the laptop projector, spelling Marx’s name "Carl." "We have to know our enemy. If we don’t know our enemy, we can’t fight ‘em, and the only way we’ll get to know ‘em is to read their playbooks."

At this, M spoke up again. "We are not the KKK without sheets. We don’t have a problem with the skin color of the man in the White House. We have a problem with his policies. We are fighting an entitlement mentality. We are trying to break young people of that entitlement mentality."

At this, I could stay silent no longer. "Looking around the room, I see mostly mature voters, and I hear the greatest amount of concern being expressed about about taxes. How do you plan to make this movement appealing to young people, who have very different concerns, and get them excited about what you stand for?"

Mrs. W, her son, and M all turned to me. "We have to talk to our kids, and our grandkids, and our neighbor’s kids, and our kids’ friends. We have to tell ‘em what’s right. We can’t depend on them learning it anywhere else. We have to understand what we believe and why we believe it."

"Networking!" said someone brightly.

"That’s right!" said Mrs. W.

Another man from across the room offered, "We have to be willing to engage in dialogue with those who are open to discussion. And we have to back up everything we say with facts and knowledge of the Constitution."

"If you want a great book that will help you understand the Constitution," said yet another avid reader, "Read ‘The 5,000-Year Leap’ by W. Cleon Skousen. After you read that, you will understand the Constitution so much better."

Mrs. W, having had to bypass several agenda items due to the robust discussion, quickly moved to close the meeting. "Our battleground is no longer with rifles, but with voting," she began, warming up to a grand finish. My Democratic partner in subversion, K, immediately raised her hand: "If this is a grassroots organization, there must be some concern for not just national and state politics, but local. What is the group’s plan to effect change in the local government?"

"We don’t know much about local government," said Mrs. W. "If anyone has any information, email it to me." K made a note of it.

Getting back to her closing, Mrs. W said, "Prayer is our greatest power. Pray every day for our nation. God can do great things. And our true national leader is God."

All patriots bowed their heads in prayer, weighed down, as it were, with the task before them. Whatever that might be.

What I learned: Though I had read it and heard it, nothing beats direct observation. The people in this room were not merely inexperienced grassroots organizers--they had no idea how to coalesce a movement, recruit members, articulate a platform, gather and analyze facts, or even operate rudimentary audio-visual equipment. They had no instincts for critical thinking, preferring instead to be told what to do by authority figures who seem to have information they agree with. They felt more comfortable relinquishing responsibility for the outcome of events on God than taking responsibility themselves. Two or three seemed to have the ability to argue more than one side of an issue or to address mainstream perceptions of their efforts. But overall, they appeared to be looking not for a way to blaze a new trail of political thought, but for validation of an extremely isolated, provincial viewpoint. Though the experience of sitting in that room was one of the most dismaying in my life, ranking right up there with being told in the delivery room that my epidural had failed, I came away with the conviction that this group was ignorant, annoying, and clueless, but not, ultimately, a threat to democracy, mainstream politics, or the Geek Squad.