Palin was the big star at the Tea Party gathering, but is she The One?

That wasn't the only identity crisis. While local volunteers told their grass-roots success stories in small meeting rooms, Palin's predecessors on the main stage seemed determined to drag the new insurgency into the muck of past controversy. Joseph Farah, publisher of the right-wing WorldNet Daily, devoted half his speech to discredited claims about Obama's birth certificate. And failed 2008 White House hopeful Tom Tancredo made headlines when he complained that "we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country" - a painful echo of Jim Crow-era voting laws.

Rising conservative media figure Andrew Breitbart strived to turn the allegation around, telling a cheering crowd that "this is a form of intimidation that the mainstream media does, is they call you a racist." At the time, there appeared to be only two black conference attendees in the room: a congressional hopeful and a minister who'd given the invocation the night before.

But race wasn't the only barrier. There was also an age gap. At another point, Phillips asked the big room if anyone was a Baby Boomer, born between 1946 and 1964 - and almost every hand shot up. So this was their delayed bizarro-world Woodstock, three days of anti-government music, with occasional dancing in the muck of conspiracy. And Palin, with her discordant national anthem, was their Jimi Hendrix.