Road trip commemorates infamous 'hug'

All those folks who dismissed 2009's revolutionary tea party movement as something they dearly hoped it was - a momentary hissy, a tantrum by half wits who soon would return to their couches, their "Faux News" and their tapioca pudding - Kim Irvine has a bus trip for you.

Oh, wait. The bus is full. Rats. Perhaps you would like to join the caravan of folks in their personal vehicles escorting the bus, like so many dry-land small craft surrounding the motor coach version of the pirate ship Jose Gasparilla.

It turns out the tea party movement is hale, hardy and rippling with renewable energy supplied almost daily by the Democratic majority in Washington, but not just there. Wednesday, Irvine and a dozen or two or three of her friends and associates from Pasco County will join perhaps thousands of others for another of those annoying take-back-our-country rallies in Fort Myers.

The occasion is the first anniversary of "The Hug," the onstage man-squeeze between Gov. Charlie Crist and President Barack Obama.

Obama arrived fresh off his ascendancy - er, inauguration - and pressing for passage of his breathtaking (and utterly unread) $787 billion (since revised upward by the Congressional Budget Office to $862 billion) "stimulus" package. Crist blew in at the soaring height of his popularity, a gazillion points ahead in pursuit of his next posting and no doubt already greeting himself in the bathroom mirror as "Senator."

Bump heard 'round the state

The chest-bumping event, replayed relentlessly on the Web, is the fulcrum on which much subsequent political leveraging has pivoted. Grass-roots Republicans already thinking they'd been had averted their gaze ... serendipitously discovering Marco Rubio.

A year later, Rubio increasingly resembles the GOP lock to succeed Mel Martinez seat-warmer (and Crist pal) George LeMieux in the U.S. Senate. Rubio leads Crist among likely Republican voters and, trumping the old Crist argument, polls put him further ahead of likely Democratic nominee Kendrick Meek.

Wednesday, it'll be Rubio on the Harborside Event Center stage where Crist and Obama made history, commemorating - along with the busy folks at Dick Armey's FreedomWorks - the embrace that launched a million shrieks, and Florida's tea party movement.

"That was the start of the tea party revolution," says Irvine, former nurse and founder last summer of the Land O' Lakes-based Citizens Protecting the Republic. "That hug sparked the revolution."

Chance seizes opportunity

Six months later, CPR continues gathering members and steam, among them Steve Grossenbacher, 74. He and wife, Sharon, 64, live in a subdivision just up County Road 54 from Irvine, but it took like-minded conservatives rallying on the National Mall for them to meet.

Serendipity is as serendipity does. The rest, however, Grossenbacher and friends are not willing to leave to chance. They've got "fire in the belly" and come November, he says, "We're going to vote a bunch of stupid people out of Washington."

Doubt them? These self-described patriots are willing to find you a seat in the caravan.