Like most political reporters here, I fervently wish the Tea Party movement the very best in its efforts to stage a political uprising. And I would love to see Sarah Palin run against Barack Obama in 2012, as she says she might do.

I say that in all sincerity. Because no television news lineup editor can resist these characters. Meaning a busy season for me.

Palin is best, whether she's reading patriotic generalities from crib notes scribbled on her palm (after mocking Obama's use of a teleprompter), or standing before ecstatic Tea Partiers calling out: "Do you love your freedom?"

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin addresses the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville on Feb. 6, 2010. (Ed Reinke/Associated Press)

(What I love is a speech line like that. The implication, of course, being that (a) freedom is somehow endangered in America and (b) that liberals and the "elite" would rather not be free.)

But the Tea Partiers, that loose affiliation of angry right-wingers who coalesced last year around the Fox News Channel's crusade against Obama, also consistently provide news cameras with an embarrassment of video riches.

Some of them show up at rallies with guns, or signs depicting President Obama as Hitler, Stalin, a turbaned bomber or, as one enthusiastic participant put it, "a half-breed Muslin."

Presumably, the fellow didn't mean Obama is made of loosely woven cotton.

Tea Party world

The Tea Partiers' America is a richly imagined nation, one in which a suitably shrunken government, its general uselessness exposed to all, answers directly to ruggedly individualistic citizens who carve out decent livings solely by dint of hard work and entrepreneurial spirit, scorning government handouts, and who are free of crippling taxes and regulations.

Everybody speaks English in this America, preferably only English, and prays regularly. Their children don't need abortions because they practise abstinence until they enter into a heterosexual marriage, often after military service, during which they get to go into combat abroad against America's myriad enemies.

A Tea-Party America would already be whacking the Iranians, slapping North Korea around and straightening out the Pakistanis.

All of this would be financed by waves of tax cuts here at home because, as everybody knows, tax cuts provoke such wild economic growth that governments actually wind up richer.

Stay out of my pocket

OK, I won't go on. I'm sounding smart-alecky, I know, but the foregoing isn't as much of a caricature as it might sound.

America's Tea Partiers, for all their colourful ideas, are really only a spectacular crystallization of certain opinion currents in the broader citizenry.

Or, as Newsweek columnist Jacob Weisberg so tartly put it last week, "the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large."

What he meant is that the Tea Partiers aren't the only ones who cherish this rugged individualist fantasy.

Americans in general differ from Europeans and Canadians principally on their professed attitude toward government.

Like Europeans, Americans demand the security and services government provides, but at the same time they distrust it and loathe how it's always reaching into their pockets.

And they seldom bother to reflect on that contradiction.

Cut my ribbon

Polls suggest most Americans now oppose Obama's economic stimulus package, citing lack of fiscal probity.

At the same time, a majority supports the road-paving and bridge-fixing it provides.

(Politicians understand this perfectly. Republicans, who rail most harshly against stimulus, nonetheless show up, smiling and schmoozing, at ribbon-cuttings and groundbreakings for stimulus projects in their districts.)

Americans might hate stimulus, but they also tend to approve of the extensions to unemployment benefits and food stamps it has provided. Not to mention the upkeep to schools and municipal services during these tough times.

I remember interviewing a politically active farmer in Missouri a few years back. This fellow wrote a column for a conservative think-tank publication, generally reinforcing every conceivable anti-government stereotype.

I asked him about the huge government subsidies he and his colleagues in agribusiness collect from Washington, subsidies that allow them to crush Third World competition.

He stared at me and said he really didn't have an answer. Clearly, he wasn't going to write a column denouncing that particular handout.

Don't break the China

Similarly, when Florida's active Tea Party movement denounces Obama for his "socialist," "big-government" agenda, it's not talking about Medicare and Social Security, the vast entitlement programs that provide free health care and modest pensions to so many of Florida's senior citizens.

In fact, with an almost clinical cognitive dissonance, the partiers routinely warn Democrats to keep their hands off Medicare.

Anyway, having so effectively channelled all this contradictory ambivalence, you would think that the Tea Partiers, with Palin leading the attack, are about to decisively upset Washington's order in this year's mid-term elections.

But take a closer look: A new ABC News/Washington Post survey suggests most Americans see Palin unfavourably. In fact, an overwhelming majority don't think she's fit for the White House.

That number includes most Democrats, a majority of independents and even a majority of, um, Republicans.

As for the Tea Partiers, even the politicians they support are being careful about returning the embrace.

Hardline conservative Marco Rubio has Tea Party endorsement in his struggle with Florida's Republican governor, Charlie Crist, for one of that state's two U.S. Senate seats.

Crist is generally regarded by Tea Partiers as a wishy-washy Republican at best, and one whose sexuality is questionable to boot.

But Rubio, while accepting Tea Party money, insistently distances himself from the movement in his interviews, clearly realizing that it could be a political drag somewhere down the road.

Count on this, too: Palin will remain the Tea Party queen only as long as she remains on Fox News's payroll as a "contributor."

If she gets serious about the White House, she'll also get serious about moderating her positions.

Because, deep down, below all that bluster about rugged individualism, Americans are really every bit as attached to their government as Europeans or Canadians

As Bill Davis, a pretty successful Ontario premier, once said, voters really want the same thing from the people they elect as they do from a housekeeper: Be on time, don't cost too much and, for God's sake, don't break anything.