WHY THE G.O.P. CAN’T STEER THE TEA PARTY “BANDWAGON.”

“What we’ve got to realize is that the dam has broken and there’s all this pent-up energy coming out, and it’s hard to harness,” says Burford, a local tea party organizer in the rural north Florida town of Jennings. “The fact is, there’s not a lot of real harnessing that can be done. It’s going to tend to carve the river bed the way it wants to.”

Indeed.