JOEL KOTKIN: Democrats Could Face an Internal Civil War as Gentry and Populist Factions Square Off:

Broadly speaking, there is a long-standing conflict inside the Democratic Party between gentry liberals and populists. This division is not the same as in the 1960s, when the major conflicts revolved around culture and race as well as on foreign policy. Today the emerging fault-lines follow mostly regional, geographical and, most importantly, class differences.

Gentry liberals cluster largely in cities, wealthy suburbs and college towns. They include disproportionately those with graduate educations and people living on the coasts. Populists tend to be located more in middle- and working-class suburbs, the Great Plains and industrial Midwest. They include a wider spectrum of Americans, including many whose political views are somewhat changeable and less subject to ideological rigor. . . .

Although peace now reigns between the Clintons and the new president, the broader gentry-populist split seems certain to fester at both the congressional and local levels – and President Obama will be hard-pressed to negotiate this divide. Gentry liberals are very “progressive” when it comes to issues such as affirmative action, gay rights, the environment and energy policy, but are not generally well disposed to protectionism or auto-industry bailouts, which appeal to populists. Populists, meanwhile, hated the initial bailout of Wall Street – despite its endorsement by Mr. Obama and the congressional leadership.

Geography is clearly a determining factor here. Standout antifinancial bailout senators included Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Jon Tester of Montana. On the House side, the antibailout faction came largely from places like the Great Plains and Appalachia, as well as from the suburbs and exurbs, including places like Arizona and interior California.

Hmm. Map this to the “tea party” protests. (Via NewsAlert).

HOPE AND CHANGE: Obama’s Iraq speech: Brought to you by George W. Bush. I think that magnanimity was never on the menu.

SAVE TIME AND ENERGY BY cooking pasta with less water.

RICK MORAN THINKS THE “TEA PARTY” PROTESTS are amateurish and disorganized. At Playboy, on the other hand, they think they’re suspiciously well-coordinated. Both are right!

Of course they’re amateurish. Most of these people have never organized a protest before (hence the tendency to do things like forget bullhorns). That’s what you get at the beginning of a movement. But it’s much bigger news when 200 people with jobs who’ve never protested turn out, than when 20,000 of the usual suspects organized by ACORN or ANSWER march with preprinted signs. If this keeps up (and I think it just might) the amateurishness will fade away soon enough. Then Moran will probably complain about the loss of authenticity.

The Playboy folks, meanwhile, miss two things. One is that, as reader Miles Wilson noted, these protests predate Santelli. The other is that modern technology allows a bunch of people who don’t know each other to coordinate a nationwide campaign “suspiciously” well. Somebody should write a book on that subject some day.

UPDATE: Some related thoughts here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Robert Crawford writes: “I get the feeling that if the tea parties were organized by a group as far-right as ANSWER is far-left, *THAT* would be the major story.”

MORE THOUGHTS ON PROTEST ORGANIZATION, TEA PARTIES, and social media, from Moe Lane.

SOME THOUGHTS ON WHERE THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT SHOULD GO NEXT. Plus this: “Also, while this is and should remain a people’s movement, isn’t it time for some politicians to come out of hiding and start addressing, if not even attending some of these events? I suspect protesters have plenty of questions for them. . . . Lastly, anything scheduled for Chris Dodd’s Connecticut by chance? Two birds with one stone and all that.”

There was actually one in Hartford, but I agree that Dodd’s a natural target. In fact, protesters might consider targeting particular Senators or Representatives in their areas who are either (1) especially egregious offenders, or (2) susceptible to having their positions changed under pressure. Maybe even try to extract a promise that before voting on spending bills in the future, they’ll actually read them . . . .

THEY TOLD ME IF OBAMA WERE ELECTED WE’D BRING THE TROOPS HOME. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! National Guard set to pull out of New Orleans. “In less than four years our military stabilized the region and re-established law, order, and democracy for its citizens.”

WELL, WE WON: End to Baghdad’s ‘dark era’: Nightclubs reopen. Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy?

A REPORT FROM THE Philadelphia Tea Party today.

And reader Peter Sterne suggests a slogan: “No Legislation Without Deliberation!”

JONATHAN CHAIT: Obama’s Intelligence Blunder. It’s only a blunder if you don’t like the result.

MICHAEL SILENCE: Somebody didn’t tell these people there’s a recession. “What’s up? All I can figure is there’s a lot of people who haven’t been watching NBC News.”

ANDREW BOLT:

GOOD thing for Barack Obama that he isn’t George Bush. He’d have been slaughtered for starting so badly that he’s picking a Cabinet of tax cheats. . . .

how loudly would the people who cheer Obama have screamed if Bush had, for instance, surrounded himself with this extraordinarily long list of spivs and chiselers?

There’s Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader whom Obama picked as Health secretary, but was forced to quit for having failed to pay more than $150,000 in taxes – and for pulling a mysterious $1.5 million a year as an influence-peddler to a law firm.

Nancy Killefer, Obama’s choice as the government’s chief performance officer, also had to quit, having failed to pay unemployment taxes for her household help.

Timothy Geithner, on the other hand, still got appointed Treasury secretary despite having also failed to pay taxes – more than $60,000 in his case. Hilda Solis likewise survived, becoming Labor secretary even though her husband owed $10,000 in taxes.

Hmm. What is it about Big Government Democrats that they so hate paying the taxes they impose on others? And we haven’t finished with that list, either.

Obama’s first choice as Commerce Secretary, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, had to quit to fight grand jury charges of selling favors. . . .And now helping Obama run the economy are two powerful Democratic Congressmen he’s inherited from his party – Charlie Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing House ways and means Committee, who failed to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income from his luxury Caribbean villa, and Chris Dodd, who as chair of the Senate banking committee received $200,000 in donations from the now collapsed Fannie Mae, plus sweetheart loans from Countrywide Financial, another business he was supposed to be regulating.

Not being able even to pick a clean team would be embarrassing enough – proof that the neophyte in the White House has run nothing in his life but an election campaign – but worse is that Obama actually promised to transform Washington with “the most sweeping ethics reform in history.

Ouch. And that doesn’t even get to the latest Greg Craig revelations. But I like “spivs and chancers.”

A ROUNDUP OF TEA PARTY PICTURES at PJTV.

WHO’S IN BED WITH WALL STREET?

Perhaps the “deregulation” he refers to is the unregulated market of credit-default swaps. This was a derivative security that banks and investors used to insure against credit defaults. He should know that former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, described by President Clinton as the greatest treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton, pushed his Citigroup bank to pursue these instruments and aggressively invest in sub-prime mortgages. Today, Citigroup is on the verge of bankruptcy. Prior to Citigroup, Mr. Rubin was with Goldman Sachs. (Former Treasury Secretary Paulson was also with Goldman Sachs. Wonder if they knew each other.)

Is there a connection between the Democratic Party, New York state and Wall Street? There are two U.S. senators from New York, and one was Hillary Clinton. The other is Chuck Schumer. When you are a senator from New York and the financial capital of the world is located in your home state, you must develop a cozy relationship with Wall Street. You don’t oppose your banker friends because your political success is tied to Wall Street. So you sort of develop a two-faced persona. You deride Wall Street in front of the cameras, but you have wine and cheese with them while in Manhattan.

Plus this: “About the same time, Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd received a below-market interest rate for one of his mortgages.” Really? Why didn’t that make the news?

FROM THE KANSAS MEADOWLARK: “Tea Party” Rally and March to Senator McCaskill’s Office in Kansas City.

Plus, 200 determined taxpayers slog through a snowstorm.

INSIDE THE PJTV NERVE CENTER, at the CPAC hotel.

READER FRED SIESEL sends a report from today’s NYC Tea Party protest:

Just got back from the NY Tea Party. You will, I’m sure, be getting more detailed reports, with photos, but this is an “early” report. I arrived at the City Hall park forty minutes before the scheduled time and began to wonder if I made a mistake on the details. I spent a little time and money in J&R Music and went across the street to the park about 20 minutes of two. There were a disheartening 30-40 people there. But, the number quickly began to increase. My guess as to the size of the crowd was circa 300. Many carried placards. The theme most common to most of them was “No to Socialism”. I jotted some of the, to me, “memorable” signs:

No to American Socialism
Socialism Kills
Pork the Other (Red) Meat
Liberty is All the Stimulus We Need
United States of France
Trickle Up Poverty, and
Foreclose the White House

There were also two signs, one quoting Margaret Thatcher and the other amending a Ronald Reagan line during the 1980 campaign.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

A recession is when your neighbor loses his job.
A depression is when you lose your job.
Recovery begins when Jimmy (Obama) Carter lose his job.

There was also a noteworthy t-shirt with the following:

To: The New York Times
Why are terrorists innocent until proven guilty
But, NYC Cops guilty until proven innocent?

The back of the t-shirt had the same question, except for the substitution of U.S. Marines for NYC Cops. The fellow wearing it said he was a former Marine.

There were reporters there from the two 24-hour local NYC stations: WCBS and WINS.

Many people got up to say their piece. Common theme: Liberty/freedom vs. Socialism/Marxism.

Still going strong when I left after an hour.

Looking forward the the pictures you post and to find out how by how much my crowd estimate differed.

I’ll post some later tonight; they’ve started to come in.

UPDATE: Here’s one, courtesy of reader Robert McManus:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Abbie Meyer writes:

I drove in from Summit New Jersey for the New York City Tea Party today. There were about 150 people which is pretty good considering we were so deep in enemy territory. The crowd was polite but angry at the usual cast of Democrat characters. Lot’s of good signs. Obama…Commander and Thief ” was my favorite.

There is some real potential for this movement if organized around a central theme. 15 or so speakers of varying quality, invited and impromptu, with various conservative gripes. There was no discernible NYC media there except perhaps Univision. We are supposed to send tea-bags to our elected Representatives.

I think this movement will build as conservatives get more upset and more organized. They will be joined by moderates with pitchforks by the fall. Hopefully it won’t be too late to stop the madness by then. The next one will be better and bigger I’m sure.

Quite likely. Plus, another picture from reader Shelley Hartman, who estimates the crowd at 400.

MORE: Reader John Helferich writes:

Attendance 400, measured by head count.

Press: NY Post, NYU Student Newspaper, WINS Radio (shown below)

Crowd was enthused and full of “normal” people. Only a few cranks. No counter protests, just one kid tried to sing out a few lines of the “Marseillaise” while walking thru.

And here’s a report at the Berman Post.

AT POWERLINE, a look at how The New York TImes has flip-flopped on the dangers of deficits.

STILLBORN: Lamenting the Dodge Demon.

Hawking Chuck Norris’s Black Belt Patriotism.

OBAMA SUPPORTERS ON WALL STREET EXPERIENCING BUYER’S REMORSE: “Noteworthy up here on Wall Street, a great many Obama supporters — especially hedge-fund types who voted for ‘change’ — are becoming disillusioned with the performances of Obama and Treasury man Geithner. There is a growing sense of buyer’s remorse.”

Problem is, they only thought they were buyers. Actually, they were renters, and the lease is up.

THAT COULD BE FUN: Larry Kudlow to run against Chris Dodd? I guess this means Larry isn’t a “Friend of Angelo.”

BOB OWENS: Skyrocketing demand has been emptying the shelves of America’s gun stores. Here’s why.

IN THE MAIL: From Michael Z. Williamson, Better to Beg Forgiveness…

SO I’M AT CPAC, helping with the PJTV coverage. The atmosphere here is surprisingly cheerful — people don’t look defeated, but engaged and much happier-seeming than when I was here in 2006 for a book-signing. It was noisy last night, with college-age attendees partying up and down the hall while we tried to sleep. Below is a picture of S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, telling CPAC attendees that they could learn from the examples of Rosa Parks and Union trooops at Gettysburg.