Watchdog.org’s Bill McMorris has an interesting report on “who” the Tea Party folks are, and what has motivated them. Here’s a chunk of his story:

They are noisy; they are controversial, at once derided and celebrated by pundits and pols; but does anyone really know why so many thousands attended Tea Party protests?
One group, which sponsored tax-day protests across the country last year, set out to answer that question.
The Sam Adams Alliance, a Chicago-based non-profit group advancing free-market principles, conducted interviews with dozens of leaders in the grassroots movement to see what inspired their participation.
The group surveyed 49 individuals who had organized protests in their communities and conducted in-depth interviews with 10 of them at a conservative leadership training seminar in Houston in January.
The results surprised even Anne Sorock, who was with the group when it began sponsoring protests last year.
“We found that most of the (leaders) were inactive in politics before the Tea Parties,” she said. “For many, there was a breaking point which led them to get behind this cause.”
Nearly half of those surveyed said they had rarely participated in politics before coming to the Tea Party last year. Only 16 percent identified themselves as “very involved” in politics at the start of the movement.
Sorock said the findings stood in contrast to the idea that the protests are composed of full-time rabble rousers and the perpetually disgruntled. The leaders were, for the most part, ordinary citizens who felt compelled to act.
“Empowerment came up a lot in our interviews,” Sorock said. “They felt like they were losing their country and had to do something or they would regret it.”