Are you a teabagger?

What is teabagging? Well, it’s not what today’s Tea Party organizers think it is.

The Charlotte Observer reports 1,000 people are expected to participate in today’s protest (of … what exactly, no one knows). That’s impressive; that’s roughly 0.1 percent of the population of the Q.C. (notice the zero and the dot).

Duke University political scientist Mike Munger calls it a groundswell.

“It’s absolutely incredible,” says Munger, a Libertarian who ran for governor last year. “The thing that’s odd about it is it’s almost exclusively people who otherwise have not participated in politics before.”

But critics such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman say the protests represent less “a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment” than a movement manufactured by conservative groups and fanned by Fox News.

John Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation, says many of those attending today’s rallies will be newcomers to politics.

“They make a point of bashing Bush at least as much as Obama,” he says. “This is ‘a pox on both your houses’ kind of message.”

Although Charlotte’s Ridenhour recently got active in the Young Republicans, he says he’s not particularly happy with GOP leadership.

“When Bush shoved that (bailout) program down our throats, I was really upset,” he says. “It’s certainly not about President Obama’s administration. The problem we’re facing now is an American problem, not a party problem.”

Read the rest of this Charlotte Observer article here.

We like Rachel Maddow’s take on Conservative Teabagging best:

This article appears in Apr 14-21, 2009.