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Obamacare notwithstanding, the current president's progressive instincts have been neutered by the rise of the Tea Party and Luddite conservatism.

The tea party movement and its passion arose in response to trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and out of a sense that Washington is in need of dire fiscal reform.

If Republicans triumph in 2014, it will undoubtedly be as a result of Obamacare. In 2010, Republicans soared to historic victory because the much-maligned Tea Party spearheaded mass resistance to Obama's takeover of the healthcare industry.

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

My political views have since I was a kid someway or another reflected the concerns of Tea Party movement.

It is not an overstatement to say that Obamacare was the single most important catalyst leading to the tea party movement.

The Tea Party emerged from a laudably grassroots base: libertarians, fervent Constitutionalists, and ordinary people alarmed at the suppression of liberties, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.

The Tea Party movement went off on a more extreme agenda that I did not support at all, and was very frustrated by it, to the point that not only did I change parties, I decided to do something about it and run for Congress.

So I'm a pretty conservative fellow, but not conservative enough for the Tea Party.