Surprising Angle in Nevada.

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"There may be things you don't like about Sharron Angle.... Sharron Angle has some dents in her fender, let's be honest about it. But do I want her replacing Harry Reid in the U.S. Senate? Hell, yeah!"

Nevada's Republican Party chairman, Mark Amodei, is giving one of his many pep talks for the far right Senate candidate who is seeking to unseat the Senate majority leader in November. It's late July, and I'm with the Mt. Rose Republican Women, eating our pork and chicken dinners in the Grange, a rustic events hall filled with the air of nearby Lake Tahoe. During the primaries, a tea-party-aligned candidate for state assembly defeated a former president of this very club. With establishment Republicans shaken by the tea party rebellion, Nevada's party is weakened and divided.

Now the question is: Will members of the club go out and campaign like they always do?

Suddenly, a surprise guest jumps up next to Amodei. She's dressed like Rosie the Riveter, in blue coveralls and a kerchief. Kim Bacchus is a vibrant former Junior Leaguer, tea party activist, and doctor's wife. Channeling a 1940s factory girl, she exclaims: "We women were asked to come out of our cozy homes, and we got out in defense of our troops. We're going to roll up our sleeves. We have to do it. We have to do it this time! We're facing a ninety-day war ... to defeat our common enemy, Harry Reid. Now is the time to defend the home front, walk those neighborhoods, put up those yard signs.... The Republican Party has something the Democrats don't have: Republican Women!"

Bacchus, sixty, participated in a civil rights march in Atlanta back in the day and is married to a man from an immigrant Iranian family, so she is sensitive to the charge that tea party activists are ethnocentric or racist. In a quiet moment the next morning, she tells me Obama is alien to her not because of his supposed birthplace or race but because he has "an experience of America that has nothing to do with me. He seems to see Americans as narrow-minded, oppressive people. Everyone knows he's apologized all over the world for America being an oppressor." Alluding to a story popularized by Fox television host Glenn Beck, she says America's President was raised by Communists, with the proof being that they attended a Unitarian congregation in the 1950s tarred as the "little red church."

"It's liberty or socialism," says Bacchus, who joins friends for weekly protests at Reno's federal offices in support of Arizona's new immigration law. "Any time you are taking from one group of people and giving to another, you are denying the rights of a group. Taking from the wealthy: You can't continue to take their money, give it to people who are less productive." She views Medicare and Social Security as "a Ponzi scheme" and, like other tea party activists, sees draconian government cutbacks as the only way to tackle the federal government's $1 trillion deficit. She insists: "We are not anti-tax. We are pro-home rule. If we're going to be taxed, I want...