Jonah Goldberg is Right about which Candidates Tea Partiers Actually Support

From my vantage point interacting with plenty of Tea Partiers, this is wholly accurate:

Indeed, I’ve never thought much of all the talk about how Ron Paul is the “Godfather of the tea parties.” I’ve given major speeches at three tea party rallies (including the Cincinnati Tax Day tea party rally last year which was the biggest audience I’ve ever spoken to), and attended a couple tea party related events in the D.C. as a spectator. I  bring that up just to say that I’ve met a lot of tea party folks at the leadership level all the way down. Obviously, Ron Paul has many fans and adherents in those circles. But I never got the sense that, generally speaking, the tea partiers were definitive Ron Paul followers or fans. Among other things, I think the folks I’ve met were generally more in favor of the military, the war on terror, and mainstream conservative foreign policy than anything that could be described as Paul-ism. Moreover, both in e-mail and in person, the enthusiasm for Herman Cain and to a lesser extent Michele Bachmann and, before her, Sarah Palin, was greater than anything I’ve seen for Paul.