Sage indeed but already taken to heart. Co-opting the Tea Party will be difficult since there are no leaders, no structure, no institutional funding, nothing to grab on to, and the members mean to keep it that way.
You are correct. I think that the various TP groups should be ever vigilant to watch for politicians claiming TP endorsements and support when it is not the fact or the truth.
Yep, that's the strength of the Tea Party. Its amorphousness (and civility in behaviour) has left a lotta liberals gnashing their teeth :)
The trouble is, that strength comes at a cost. True, its leaderless distributed structure makes it impossible to co-opt. But, its free-form structure also makes it impossible to lead.
The Tea Party is a collection of disparate individuals who are bonded together by a common ideal. In Weberite terms, there's only one kind of person who can unite the Tea party: a charismatic leader.
The trouble is, political parties are not organized to accomodate charismatic leaders. To continue with the Weberism, they're far more rational-legal entities. To put it less charitably, they have more than their share of operators. People like that think a charismatic leader is a mere come-on.
I'm sure that ideological differences had something to do with Sarah Palin being sabotaged in '08, but a lot of it had to do with she being sized up by the operators as an unpredictable loose cannon. Rational-legal people hate that; they prefer predictability. For them, she "going rogue" was not a strength; it was a weakness.
Part of their hostility was rooted in that unpredictability, which will diminish over time. As they get used to her, they'll be less hostile; perhaps, the hostility will disappear entirely.
Still, the trouble with being leaderless is that different parts of the Tea Party will sign up with different leaders. When you consider the leaderlessness, the circular firing squad wasn't that surprising.
I have to admit that Mitt Romney was a pretty sharp organizer. It's almost as if he knew in advance that the circular firing squad would erupt and eliminate all his rivals. That said, his success can be taken as a lesson learned. Charismatic movements have to be formalized in order to mesh with the rational-legal organization of a political party.
Conclusion: The Tea Party's leaderless growth has turned from a vitally needed strength into a block. Tea Partiers can't take over the Republican party unless they make their peace with more formal methods of organization. That'll take some doing, but time is on their side. Once the surprise factor is gone, Republican operators (who are still needed to win) will be far less prone to go "Eek!" when someone like Sarah Palin does her thing.