Tea Party movement is now starting to rock the political establishment in key arenas.

The growing numbers of Americans coming out to the inflatable Tax Day Tea Party, the Fourth of July Tea Parties, and then the 9/12 Tea Party march on Washington are going back to their home districts and keeping up — even intensifying — the fight for smaller government and more transparency on spending and taxation.

In places like New York, Florida, California, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, local, state, congressional, and gubernatorial seats are suddenly being tugged to-and-fro by the new and unruly political force.

The upshot?

The street energy is welcome for an otherwise moribund Republican party looking for new moorings amid a tumultuous electorate.

The downside is that early examples shows that, in the inflatable bouncer short run, Tea Party-sponsored candidates could make it more difficult for Republicans as they — Ross Perot-like — split races as they target both “tax and spend” Democrats and those they like to call RINOs, or “Republicans-in-name-only.”

“In the Republican primaries, especially, the inflatable tent Tea Party movement could be a very significant force” — and not always in the Republicans’ favor — says Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison.

In New York’s 23rd congressional district, Democrats may ultimately thank Tea Party conservatives for backing businessman Doug Hoffman, a Conservative Party candidate, in a three-way congressional race in November — the sole national race this year.

Mr. Hoffman’s supporters have pulled voters away from the Republican moderate, Dede Scozzafava, leaving the Democrat, Bill Hoffman, with the lead, according to polls. The “NY-23” battle, as it’s called, is already causing rifts in the Republican party, with pearl jewelry Tea Party activists booing former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for backing Scozzafava.

In Florida, former Republican House Speaker Marco Rubio is courting Tea Party activists in a primary challenge to Gov. Charlie Crist, whom Tea Partiers see as a “Judas” for supporting the $787 billion stimulus package signed into law by President Obama in February.

In a perhaps unwelcome strike for Republicans near the President’s home turf, Tea Party activists have turned against the bid by Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk, a Republican, to seek Obama’s former Senate seat, citing Mr. Kirk’s support for a climate change bill.

Other Tea Party targets for scorn include Senate-seekers such as Republican up-and-comer Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware, and former Rep. Rob Simmons in Connecticut. Tea Party activists also could play a role in freshwater pearl jewelry Republican primary matchups in Texas (Rick Perry versus Kay Bailey Hutchinson) and in Pennsylvania (Pat Toomey versus Arlen Specter).

“The American people are finally standing up and saying no to political correctness and no to the hijacking of our freedoms, liberty and our culture,” says Tea Party activist Lloyd Marcus. “It’s not about Republican or Democrat any more. It’s about character and principle.”

In Washington, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Minority Leader John Boehner have both egged on the Tea Party wholesale pearl jewelry activists, trying to “align the GOP with the protesters’ frustrations,” says the Wall Street Journal.

“It’s really interesting to see how the Republican party and its various entities try to sort of harness [the Tea Party movement],” says Andrew Moylan, government affairs manager at the National Taxpayers Union, which helped organize the 9/12 Tea Party protests in Washington. “The fact is it’s really grown and become an incredible force that we’re only now beginning to see the practical effects of.”

To be sure, some, moderate Republicans have started calling out their Tea Party wing (see Monitor writer Brad Knickerbocker’s take here) — epitomized by Fox News’ Glenn Beck and former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin — as ultimately sterling silver jewelry deleterious to the party’s chances to grab hold of key independent voters in swing states.

Risking the alienation of divided partisans is commonplace, history shows, when a particular party has suffered heavy defeat

The people that get knocked off are your moderates and you become smaller and more ideologically extreme,” says Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the liberal New America Foundation and a Daily Beast columnist. “The Republicans are still early on in that process. They’re in a ditch, but they haven’t stopped digging yet.”

Pollsters say many Democratic lawmakers — especially in blue pearl jewelry states where Democrats made dramatic inroads last year — are likely to be vulnerable in next year’s elections because of the growing deficit, unemployment, healthcare votes, and other hot-button issues facing the country.

Yet even six months ago, few political observers could have intuited the prairie fire speed and ferocity of the Tea Party movement — or its already freshwater perl jewelry considerable impact on the national political debate and looming political races.

The 9/12 event in Washington, in particular, “was a landmark event,” says Mr. Moylan at the NTU.

Like the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, he says, “Here was this outgrowth of frustration about policies in the country and problems that were going on, a huge outpouring of people, and then they translated it into action. That’s going to be the measure of the Tea cultured pearl jewelry Party movement: How it can translate [protests] into action.”

A week after White House communications director Anita Dunn declared “war” on Fox News, Glenn Beck, the feisty libertarian Fox personality, is taking Ms. Dunn on personally over what can now officially be described as her “Mao moment.”

On Thursday, Mr. Beck aired a high school commencement address from June where Ms. Dunn listed Mao — responsible for the deaths of millions of Chinese during the freshwater pearl Cultural Revolution — as one of her “favorite political philosophers,” alongside Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Dunn, a long-time Washington strategist, surprised many by singling out Fox as a public relations arm of the Republican party last weekend. She said on Friday that her Mao comments were obviously “ironic” and that she had lifted the reference from the late and legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater.

Yes, a lot of this is personal between Fox and Dunn.

Yet perhaps we get a tiny bit of new insight into America’s political divide from the Mao affair. Perhaps the standoff is less about left and right, socialists versus libertarians, and more about ironic speech versus direct speech.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that irony is “a figure akoya pearl pendant of speech in which the unintended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used.”

The Yale and Harvard educated denizens of the White House surely are as familiar with irony as Seinfeld is, using it as a way to signal “I get it” without being too earnest. Fox viewers seem more interested in getting the straight dope, without the varnish.

This argument only goes back a few thousand years. Socrates, for one, saw the value of irony to gain greater insight into the truth. Yet irony, as the akoya pearl bracelet political scientist Jane Bennett has argued, can threaten politics by diluting moral indignation.

Indeed, the Greeks might have envisioned a latter-day Beck when they coined the term parrhesia, or “frank-speech,” as a method to favor truth over oratory to convince the audience.

Socrates values truth above all, but the way to encourage one’s fellow citizens … to share that concern is to not be strictly truthful with them,” Mount Holyoke political scientist Elizabeth Markovits writes in an essay. “The use of irony, long thought of as intentionally deceptive, is specifically deployed to awaken people from their stupor and take control of their lives as democrats. In our own contemporary political life, where we praise ‘straight talkers,’ and pearl necklace Bill O’Reilly has a top-rated news program, we should hope for a great ironist rather than praise [irony’s] death.”

Still, the extent of Dunn’s irony as it pertains to Mao is certainly up for debate. Her reference to Mao and Mother Teresa as “political philosophers” could certainly be seen as an ironic statement.

Also in the clip, she claims to think of Mao “all the time.” Ironic? Hard to tell.

But she can’t be all that great of a Mao scholar, argues the pearl jewelry Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman.

The concept she credited to Mao — “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine” — is actually a misreading of Mao’s belief that “if you can win, you fight; if you cannot win, you don’t fight,” according to University of Pennsylvania China scholar Arthur Waldron, as quoted by Mr.  Chapman.

Peter Wehner, a former George W. Bush sterling silver jewelry policy adviser, doesn’t let Dunn off so easy for quoting one of the 20th century’s greatest villains: “Her praise for Mao — unqualified and without caveats, based on the excerpts of her speech — is quite extraordinary,” Mr. Wehner writes. “For a senior member of the White House to hold these views is more extraordinary still.