Who leads the Tea Party?

[Pico and ME]

Ha! I say that, and then later read this perspective...

Why Business Should Fear the Tea Party.

According to a recent Bloomberg Poll...

...60% of tea party adherents wanted to overhaul or abolish the Fed (compared with 45% of all likely voters).

Almost two-thirds of tea partiers in the Bloomberg poll said they'd be willing to reduce research funds for Alzheimer's and other diseases to narrow the deficit; a similar proportion would consider cutting spending on roads and bridges.

...nearly 70% of tea partiers said that they're less likely to support a candidate who voted for the bank rescue.

Also...

Lesser known is that a higher proportion of tea party adherents believes that free trade agreements hurt the nation overall (61%) than does the general population (53%), according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last month. In a poll earlier this year by the Mellman Group, a majority of tea party supporters favored putting taxes on imports from countries with lower environmental standards than the United States

Another tea party target is the Internal Revenue Service. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who has emerged as the Senate's leading tea party incumbent, says that his "main goal in the Senate will not only be to cut taxes, but to get rid of the IRS." Mr. DeMint's goal is echoed by many tea party candidates, including Arkansas Rep. John Boozman, now running for Senate.

Why should this alarm big business?

John Castellani, the former head of the Business Roundtable who is now running the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, told Bloomberg Businessweek this month, with remarkable understatement, "This kind of extremism makes it much harder to plan from a business perspective."