Sarah Palin is pumped. She's having a fabulous week. This night, she is headlining the annual Reagan dinner in Des Moines, Iowa. This is flyover country, and these are her people. The turnout is a record. The crowd is buzzed. Nobody's interested in seeing Mitt Romney ("Plastic Man," her team calls him) or John McCain or any of the other dull, old men who've aspired to lead the country. They want to see her.
"Hey, Iowa!" she shouts out. "Do you LOVE your FREEDOM?" Fourteen hundred Republicans yell "YES!" She's here to tell them that if they love their freedom, it's time to take their country back.
Just 14 months ago, Sarah Palin was washed up. By the time she quit as governor of Alaska, she seemed destined to go down in history as a Tina Fey joke. Now, she's the de facto Queen of the Tea Party, a powerful insurgency that has turned out to be bigger than anybody thought. She's probably the most powerful Republican in America at the moment. Thanks to her endorsements, obscure Tea Partiers - including a few total wing nuts - have been thumping the Republican establishment's choices in the primaries. And she's not about to let the party bigwigs forget it.
Ms. Palin doesn't need to take direction any more, not from anyone. No snotty party strategists are nagging her about what to say or what to wear or how to handle Katie Couric, the way they did when she was John McCain's vice-presidential pick. Now, she's on top, and she's free to follow her own instincts.
What happened? I'm here in Iowa - $100 dinner ticket in hand - to try to find out. I want to understand why her message is so powerful, and most of all I want to meet the people she speaks for. Who are they? Are they just a bunch of angry, ignorant crackpot Christians? Will they fade away, as populist revolts generally do? Or is something deeper going on - something that may affect us here in Canada as well?
I want to ask Ms. Palin herself. Alas, she does not submit to interviews with the mainstream media (the "MSM"). Not now, not ever - not even if they are harmlessly Canadian.
These days, she's obsessed with Vanity Fair magazine, which portrays her in its current issue as an evil-tempered shrew, a serial exaggerator and a lax mother.
She mentions it in every speech. "That nutty, nutty
lamestream media!" she tells the crowd. "They just make stuff up!"
Under the circumstances, the prospect that I'll get face to face with her seems remote. Still, I'll try.
Ms. Palin and Barack Obama couldn't be more different. Yet there are uncanny parallels between the two. The same forces that swept Mr. Obama into office are the forces that have made Ms. Palin an unlikely star - and might sweep him back out again.
Both have channelled a mighty wave of fear and discontent. Both positioned themselves as outsiders running against the status quo and the elites (that's one reason why Mr. Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination). Both pledged to restore America's honour in the world.
Both have used their "authenticity" to connect with voters. And both understand the strategic use of social media as a powerful organizing tool.
Intellectually, they're not on the same planet. But each has been able to persuade millions that he or she understands them and speaks for them.
The populist wave splashes up north of the border too
If you're sitting in Canada, it's difficult to understand the Tea Party movement. Americans are far more God-struck than Canadians and have far less trust in government than we do. But you can see a similar populist impulse playing out in Toronto, where an unlikely fellow named Rob Ford could be the next mayor. Like Ms. Palin, he has hit a motherlode of discontent.
A lot of people don't care that Mr. Ford is a bit of a buffoon, or that his ideas are desperately simplistic. As deficits soar, traffic stalls and the garbage union runs amok, city hall has been building bicycle lanes and hitting voters with new taxes. What matters to his supporters is that Rob Ford gets it.
Anti-incumbency waves are rising across Canada - in B.C. with the Vander Zalm revolt against the HST; in Ontario, where Dalton McGuinty's popularity is plummeting; in Calgary, where cost-cutter Ric McIver is running for mayor.
Now, look south. When you ask why a populist insurgency is sweeping America, the question practically answers itself. Unemployment is stuck at nearly 10 per cent, and the eight million jobs that disappeared won't be coming back any time soon.
Unemployed professionals in their 50s have exhausted their savings and fear they'll never work again. Even good, safe, high-value technology jobs are being contracted out to India. The number of homes in foreclosure has hit a record.
The wave of discontent extends far beyond the Tea Party. As most Americans see it, the elites - federal bankers, Washington politicians, Wall Street and Big Business - caused the collapse, bailed themselves out and sent the people the bill. Washington's desperate rescue efforts - the bailouts, the stimulus, the mortgage rescues, Cash for Clunkers - have created trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. The nation is in hock to China.
And people fear that the expansion of the federal government symbolized by Mr. Obama's unpopular health-care plan is creating unprecedented powers that extend into almost every corner of American life.
Most Americans today believe that the American Dream is dead. They believe that the sins of the elites will be visited on their children and their grandchildren for decades to come. "I'm fearful for my grandchildren," they tell me over and over. "All they'll inherit is a mountain of debt."
Disruption and paralysis of governance extend across the country. California is essentially bankrupt. Illinois is borrowing huge sums of money just to meet its payroll, while state legislators refuse to raise taxes or cut spending. Cities are chopping essential services as they struggle to stay afloat.
People see their politicians clashing in public, but colluding in private to make sure the mountains of pork are shovelled out. They see the army of K Street lobbyists who work to make sure the gravy train of subsidies and special breaks for Big Business just keeps coming. Everybody has a seat at the table but them.
"This is not about Democrats versus Republicans," they tell me. "They're all the same."
The mainstream view of the Tea Party is pretty well summed up by The New York Times, which ran an editorial calling it "the growling face of a new fringe in American politics." As I ventured into Tea Party country, I expected to find birthers, truthers, bigots, Bible-thumpers, Islamophobes, people waving signs that say OBAMA=HITLER, and men in tricorne hats. I found a few of those. But mostly I found people like Jessica.
I talked with Jessica one brilliant, sunny day in Anchorage. I met her in a park with her two small children.
"I love Sarah Palin," she told me. "I've met her a few times. She's straightforward and she's honest. She has a conscience and she has beliefs. And she's a normal person. If you ran into her in the grocery store, it would be like, 'Hi Jessica, how are you?' "
Authenticity is at the root of Ms. Palin's appeal. People feel they know her and she understands them. Many people told me they know what's in her heart, and they know that it is good. I suppose I could make fun of them for that. Or I could recall that I and millions of other people felt the same about Barack Obama.
Jessica, a tall, solidly built 28-year-old with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, struck me as thoughtful, down-to-earth and worried. "The national debt concerns me," she said. "People's personal debt concerns me. The people in Washington are just digging the hole deeper. It would be better if they pulled their heads out of their asses."
Ordinary people, she pointed out, don't get bailouts if they screw up and go under. So why should ordinary people bail out banks and car companies? However sound their reasons, the politicians in Washington have clearly failed to make their case to millions of people like Jessica.
When Jessica's husband was laid off for eight months last year, they used up all their savings. She wants to go back to work, but she can't find a job in her field (she's a dental hygienist). On top of that, she has a brother in Afghanistan, fighting a war she doesn't understand.
Jessica describes herself as middle-of-the road. She thinks all the media are biased, including Fox-TV. But she also thinks that the Tea Party is portrayed in far too negative light. "I read a piece that said the Tea Party is 'mostly white,' meaning racist," she says. "It's upsetting when people say things like that."
Throwing politics-as-usual into Boston Harbour
The Tea Party was born on Feb. 19, 2009. It was on that day that Rick Santelli, a formerly obscure commentator on CNBC, the financial cable network, let loose an early-morning on-air rant. He was outraged that the government - which he said created the housing crisis in the first place by recklessly expanding subprime mortgages - was now going to use tax money from people like himself to bail out defaulting homeowners.
He accused the government of promoting bad behaviour, and he suggested that America needed another Tea Party - a reference to the heroic patriots who threw off the yoke of the hated British by dumping imported tea into the waters of Boston Harbour.
Mr. Santelli's rant went viral. Millions of Americans decided that he spoke for them, and within days they had begun to organize. Within weeks, they were holding rallies across the country. In Palin-speak, it was the dawn of the Great Refudiation. Ms. Palin didn't invent the movement. She just channelled it.
"People think the Tea Party is a formal institution, but that's a mistake," says political pollster Scott Rasmussen, who has conducted extensive research on public attitudes.
It is a leaderless, grassroots movement with no desire to be a third party. Although some branches are funded by rich businessmen, it is sustained by an army of volunteers.
Not all of them approve of Sarah Palin. Not all are social conservatives. Their shared conviction is that governments are too big and too intrusive.
"Most Americans believe they have a right to make their own decisions and live their own lives," Mr. Rasmussen says. "These people don't want to be governed from the left or right. They want to govern themselves."
Although the Tea Party is steeped in patriotism, foreign policy is not its concern. Tea Partiers believe that standing strong in the world begins with the ability to pay your own bills.
Surprisingly, few of the people I spoke to said very much about Mr. Obama. To them, he's just a symptom of a bigger problem that extends back at least a decade.
Mr. Rasmussen argues that the major division in the country now is not between the Republicans and Democrats, but between the mainstream public and the political class - the small proportion of the population, perhaps 10 per cent, (including most people who work in mainstream media) that still believes that government tries to serve the public interest, rather than colluding with big business against ordinary people.
The ingrained cynicism about Washington cuts across all parties and income groups. According to Mr. Rasmussen's polls, two-thirds of Americans say nobody in Congress is listening. Three out of four Republicans think that their own party is out of touch. Only 28 per cent of Americans believe that increased spending will help the economy.
Canadians mostly believe that the dramatic bailouts were necessary and that they saved the American economy from a far worse fate. Yet a number of prominent economists believe that many of these interventions have made the crisis worse.
The respected Economist magazine is sounding the alarm about the "Leviathan" government that is dragging the U.S. down. Even Democrats are worried that the new health-care legislation will be a bureaucratic nightmare and will push health costs way up.
A number of respectable policy heavyweights support the Tea Party platform of lower taxes, smaller government and dramatic cuts in spending.
This is not a subject on which I have an intelligent opinion. But it is at least conceivable that the great unwashed American masses may be right. It's also conceivable that they would be in the soup no matter who is in charge.
Glenn and Sarah's great, big revival-meeting show
If Sarah Palin is the unofficial queen of the insurgency, Glenn Beck is the king.
The populist wave has been very, very good to them. Their books sell in the millions. They command $60,000 or more for their speaking engagements and they travel in private jets. Ms. Palin is starring in a television series for the Discovery Channel ( Sarah Palin's Alaska ), and Mr. Beck is shilling gold on the radio.
Together, they drew hundreds of thousands of people to Washington in August for a rally that had the flavour of a huge revival meeting.
On the evening of Sept. 11, the Glenn and Sarah show is playing Anchorage. Ms. Palin's communications person has stopped communicating with me, so I have resorted to purchasing a $225 VIP ticket.
That gets me up close, and maybe I'll get lucky. The communications person has informed me that Ms. Palin will be doing no public engagements for the next few days, which turns out to be totally untrue.
A handful of protesters are hurling insults and waving signs outside the arena. "Glenn Beck - $36 million!" yells one, referring to Mr. Beck's current annual income.
"Federal deficit - one trillion!" retorts the guy next to me in line. His name is Doug. Doug has seen some troubled times, and he relates to Glenn Beck's own life story of drug addiction, alcoholism, and personal salvation. He also relates to Glenn Beck's message.
"Washington is a wretched hive of scum and villainy," he says, quoting a line from Star Wars.
Still, most of this audience isn't angry - just excited. I meet a single woman from California who used to be a Democrat. I meet a black guy who works for the state government and has flown here from Juneau to see his hero.
"The United States is like Greece," he says. "Only there's nobody to bail us out."
I ask him about claims that the Tea Party is full of racists and bigots. "That's the last refuge of people who have no ideas," he replies.
On the sidelines of the packed arena, I see the usual sprinkling of journalists from the national media. "Look at all those fanatics," one says.
This event was originally billed as Mr. Beck's alone, but Ms. Palin has agreed to introduce him. Although she usually wears red (a sexy jacket cut to a centimetre above her cleavage), on this night she's wearing black, on account of Sept. 11.
She has on a pair of towering black platform sandals. Her body-hugging black suit has a wide cinch belt and a pencil-thin skirt. Unlike the vast majority of middle-aged American women, she is toned and taut. She's the fittest-looking 46-year-old mother of five I have ever seen.
"Hey, Alaska!" she shouts out. "Do you LOVE your FREEDOM?" By gosh, they do.
She takes her shots at the elites and the "brutal leftist lamestream media." She invokes God. She praises American exceptionalism, and says that, unlike some people in Washington, she's not afraid to say she's proud of her country. She tells us she went caribou hunting last week, and got blood under her fingernails.
She doesn't have a platform. She's a cheerleader. She has energy, an attitude and a bunch of slogans.
Glenn Beck leads his people through the desert
Then comes Mr. Beck. I thought that he would be a ranter like Rush Limbaugh. Instead, he's a cross between a therapist and a revival-meeting preacher.
Instead of the Bible, his sacred texts are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America has strayed from the true path set down by the Founding Fathers, he says. The road to salvation is to restore their values: prudence, self-reliance, responsibility and limited government.
Mr. Beck used to rant away at "Obama-style socialism," but lately he has been giving his audience an extended lecture on American history. All across the country, Tea Partiers are gathering to study the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the way other people study the Bible.
Some of them are known as Tenthers, because of their devotion to the 10th Amendment, the one that reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Some want to use this amendment to repeal "Obamacare." Some want to abolish Social Security.
Glenn Beck is widely regarded as the Mad Hatter of the Tea Party, a dangerous demagogue who wants to blow up the federal government and the entire welfare state and throw the poor out in the streets to starve. But tonight he sounds like nothing so much as a recovered alcoholic.
"We've got to kick our habit - personal and collective - of spending money we don't have," he tells the audience. Make no mistake - this is going to hurt.
"We have to do this for our children," he insists. "We've had everything given to us. And for those to whom much is given, much is required. We've got two choices. Do the right thing now, sacrifice now, or our children will be slaves, trapped in the middle of a desert, with nothing."
By now, the audience has fallen completely still. Glenn Beck is an emotional and spellbinding storyteller. His imagery - the desert, the captivity, the future generations in chains - is deliberately biblical. The greatest test our generation faces is to restore our children's future and find our way back to the promised land.
"The greatest generation," he concludes, his voice choking, "is the one that steps to the plate when it doesn't want to." The crowd rises to its feet and bursts into thunderous applause.
Glenn Beck is the guy that liberals love to hate. Jon Stewart is even planning to hold a counter-rally in Washington next month. He's going to call it the Rally to Restore Sanity. This is what it means to live in a postmodern political world: The two most impassioned and articulate voices in politics are television performers.
I didn't get face to face with Ms. Palin. Not that night. She left without a trace - no scrums, no autographs. Why bother? She connects directly with her fans via a steady stream of tweets and Facebook posts, some of which she may even write herself.
Last year, she lobbed a stink bomb with a single Facebook posting about the health-care bill, which wrongly claimed that it would include "death panels." The rumour spread like wildfire, and nothing the administration did or said could stamp it out.
Ms. Palin is an instinct politician. She has always run as a rogue and a reformer. Will she compete to be the ultimate insider, and run for president as well? She may be so detached from reality that she'll do it; she has a giant ego and an inflated sense of her own talents.
But the bubble she lives in protects her from the truth, which is that even her most ardent fans do not think that she's presidential material.
I know, because I've asked them. She's too lightweight - too sketchy, no gravitas.
"I like her, but she's a little ditzy," one well-dressed middle-aged woman says. Mr. Rasmussen's polls confirm this view is widespread.
That news comes as a huge relief. Even Tea Partiers are more sane than we think they are.
Yet any Republican who wants to run for president is going to need Ms. Palin's blessing. And any politician who wants to succeed will have to find a way of channelling some of the Tea Party's energy.
Sure, some of its candidates are nuts. But some - such as Scott Brown, who stunned everyone by winning the dynastic Kennedy Senate seat in Massachusetts - are capable and highly credible.
A lot of smart people predict that the Tea Party will fade away as soon as the economy improves. But what if the economy doesn't improve? The slump could last for years.
There's another thing happening in America - and Canada as well - and that's the continuing exploding populations of outer suburbs ("exurbs") at rates higher than any other kind of place. Exurbanites definitely prefer tax-cutting to stimulus spending in order to boost economic growth.
Government, therefore, may have to reconcile itself to its declining ability to regulate a modern economy with models and instincts rooted in the past. Mr. Obama's beneficent-government ideals may well turn out to be the end of the New Deal line that has extended down from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In the long run, the Tea Party might be a force for good, by creating a climate for serious financial reform.
In the short run, it is likely to make Washington politics even more ugly and bizarre than ever. Canada won't be exempt from the turmoil.
We, too, will have to own up to the bills that are coming due. We, too, have no taste for paying higher taxes to support entitlements for public-sector employees that the rest of us don't have.
You can already hear the kettle starting to boil.
As for Ms. Palin, I have one piece of unfinished business.
At long last, I track her to her native habitat
There's a rumour going around that Sarah Palin might drop in on a 9/11 rally in her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska. I rent a car and drive there.
People in Wasilla are cheesed at the "MSM." Their most famous citizen is universally portrayed as a raving fruitcake, and, by extension, so are they. In fact, I thought that nobody would talk to me. But Wasillians are super-friendly.
At the rally where Ms. Palin might show up, I chat with Julie Gillette, the president of the Republican women's club. She's miffed because Vanity Fair wrote that Ms. Palin bought some fancy underwear and charged it to the Republican campaign.
"People's political ideas are fair game, but not their underwear," Ms. Gillette says.
That underwear is alleged to be Spanx - a 21st-century, high-tech garment that holds you in to make you look smooth and buff. In other words, Vanity Fair says that even Ms. Palin's taut torso is inauthentic.
Ms. Gillette disagrees. "Does it look to you like she needs Spanx?" she says. "Look at her. She's tight!"
I look. Sure enough, Ms. Palin has turned up.
She's out of her bubble, just a few feet away, laughing and hugging and signing pieces of paper on the back of her daughter Piper, whose job is to bend over and try not to look bored. Now's my chance.
I ease through the throng until I'm close enough to shake Ms. Palin's nicely manicured hand. (No caribou blood that I can see.)
She beams right in my face. She's gorgeous. Her teeth are perfect, her features as striking as a beauty queen's. (After all, she was the runner-up Miss Alaska in 1984.)
And Julie's right: She is tight. She smells nice too.
"Hi. I'm the journalist from Canada," I say.
The thousand-watt smile freezes as she pivots gracefully away. Obviously I'm as welcome as an infestation of bedbugs.
"Governor Palin," I ask politely. "What's your view of how the media have treated you?"
"The lamestream media just make stuff up!" she squeals, addressing herself to the crowd at large. "And they lie!"
She begins navigating her way toward the exit, Piper in tow. And then she's gone.
Margaret Wente is a columnist for The Globe and Mail.