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The Tea Party in the United States' biggest fight is with the Republican establishment, which is really a collection of crony capitalists that feel that they have a different set of rules of how they're going to comport themselves and how they're going to run things.

At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing.

I think the Tea Party has brought important issues to the table.

As in nature, politics abhors a vacuum. Without a strong voice for more moderate leadership, the Tea Party is filling that vacuum.

So, a lot of my supporters back home are members of the Tea Party.

The Tea Party movement itself is maybe 15, 20 percent of the electorate. It's relatively affluent, white, nativist. You know, it has rather traditional nativist streaks to it. But what is much more important, I think, is the - is its outrage.

On the issues the Tea Party cares about, I land right in their bull's-eye.

The fundamental weakness in the Tea Party machine is the stark difference between what the leaders of the Tea Party elite - plutocrats like the Koch Brothers -want and what the average grassroots Tea Party follower wants.

I think that, you know, when we start talking about the Tea Party, people want to marginalize that into some kind of organization or party, but it really isn't.