The national Tea Party movement is planning something to mark the first anniversary of Barack Obama's inauguration. Or, to be more accurate, they're planning "nothing" -- they're planning on staying home. With a vengeance.

The Contra Costa Times recently reported on this phenomenon, and the article is remarkable when you read between its lines. Now, perhaps this is just because the Times is a regional paper (the East Bay of San Francisco Bay) and not a national one, or perhaps the article was longer and was edited down for space or something. Because the most striking thing, to me, about the article is the degree of disagreement in the Tea Party movement.

For instance, they can't even agree whether the protest should be called a "boycott" or a "strike." Perhaps it'll be the birth of one of those compound terms, like "strikecott," or even "boystrike" (nah, probably not, on that last one, for obvious reasons).

Read the entire article to see the level of disconnect I'm talking about (it's short). The article ends with:

[Lloyd] Rekstad [a local Tea Party organizer] said the planned strike is motivated by general frustration with Obama's agenda, but different sites promoting the strike cite different motivations.

Some say protesting Congress' health care reform bills is the strike's explicit focus.

"We will not become tax slaves to pay for a government-run health-rationing scheme," says the National Day of Strike event page on Facebook. It goes on to say that "liberal Democrats are ... more interested in increasing their political power than fixing the problems that exist in the best health care system in the world."

Another group, Patriots for America, says the strike is aimed at protesting a ballooning deficit and increased government spending.

Another site specifically devoted to the Jan. 20 strike ... is even more general, saying the strike aims to speak against corruption and damage to the country's economy.

This follows the first part of the article, which quotes several people who are not exactly in agreement over the called-for strike. Or boycott. Or whatever it is.

Two things immediately strike me about this story (OK, bad pun there... sorry). The first is that the Tea Party runs the risk of orchestrating a flop. And the second is that just "being against Obama" is not exactly a fully-fledged political platform.

A national strike is an effective and powerful tool -- if you can pull it off. Anyone familiar with France's Labor movement (who strike with regularity, just to flex their Union muscles) knows this full well. But there's always the problem of: "What if they gave a strike, and nobody noticed?" This is where people start using the "one-day boycott" terminology. Because if the purpose is to tank the economy for one day, it's a rather pointless exercise. If you don't buy groceries on Monday, you still have to eat the rest of the week; so you'll be in the stores Tuesday, instead. And trust me, Safeway's bottom line isn't going to notice a one-day blip like that, even if you do get enough people to participate on any given single day.

The first time a one-day boycott was in vogue, it involved gasoline companies. We were all supposed to strike a blow for low gas prices by boycotting the buying of gas for one day, to bring the oil companies to their knees. Which, to put it mildly, was not wildly effective.

Now, a "strike" is a different breed of cat than a "boycott." In a strike, you prove to Big Business that your power lies in the laborers themselves (not in their consumer buying power), and that you have the means to bring production to a halt. But, even if the Tea Party were a much bigger movement than it currently appears to be, since they are not a labor "union of brotherhood" between one single industry, their effectiveness will likely be diluted. They are, in essence, calling for a "general strike" -- where all workers "down tools" on the same day, no matter the industry -- to send a very pointed message indeed: we can cripple the economy with our power; and we stand united, so don't try to divide us up.

But such a general strike, unless brought off in sufficient numbers, runs the risk of not even being noticed by the public at large, or by any particular industry (or even by any one particular business). Even such normally-friendly news outlets as Fox may have a hard time boosting the Tea Party's efforts, since (unlike a street demonstration or rally) sitting at home and refusing to be a consumer doesn't exactly make for good video clips. "Here's John Q. Public, sitting on his rear-end, watching television... in angry protest" doesn't really cut it on the evening news, in other words.

This is why a general strike, while indeed a very powerful tool, is one seldom wielded -- because it is the "nuclear bomb" of Union weapons. It is used sparingly for a reason, and that reason mostly has to do with the fact that it is incredibly hard to actually pull off. If the Tea Partiers want to take a day off, that's fine and good, but if their numbers are so small that nobody notices, then that may wind up being the news story instead.

It has a high probability of failing to achieve its goals, in other words. Which is probably why they're already using the "one-day boycott" language instead, to lower this particular bar in advance.

The second problem is almost as big as the first, and may be inherent to the Tea Party movement itself. It can best be summed up as: libertarian grassroots movements don't exactly lend themselves to cohesiveness, almost by definition. If getting Democrats to head in the same direction is akin to "herding cats," then getting grassroots libertarian-types to all agree is more like trying to convince oxygen atoms to all go in the same direction. It's a tough row to hoe.

Who, exactly, is the "Tea Party," is the true question. Are they a grassroots bottom-up movement among like-minded individuals, or are they just crazy people waving hate-filled signs? Are they economic populists, or do they just want to see the president fail spectacularly? Are they a Republican fake-grassroots (or "AstroTurf") mob who is ready, willing, and able to scream on demand, or are they a freedom-infused movement of rugged individualists angry at the overreach of the federal government? Will they force the Republican Party in a bold new direction, or will they actually form a separate Tea Party, complete with their own third-party candidates and platform?

Even if the answers to any of these were known, there's an even bigger question lurking behind the scenes: what do the Tea Partiers really stand for? What political principles will they rally around? They have a planned "convention" early this year (with, reportedly, keynote speaker Sarah Palin... if she shows up, that is), so many of these questions will doubtlessly be answered then.

But it's my guess that such a meeting of the minds may actually raise more questions than it answers. This is the nature of radical movements, whether they come from the Left, the Right, or completely off the normal political one-dimensional spectrum. Inherent in organizing radicals is the hard, cold fact that it is very, very hard to get such radicals to agree on anything -- even the basics.

This is evidenced, once again, by the quotes from the Contra Costa Times article. When trying to lead an organization seemingly devoted to the concept of free-thinkers, it is notoriously hard to get any large majority of them to actually follow you.

As I said, this may have been due to the article itself. The media, both mainstream (outside of Fox News, of course) and bloggy liberal, tends to ridicule the Tea Partiers rather than even attempting to take them seriously. So the author of the article may have chosen his quotes precisely to play up the disagreements among the various Tea Party factions. But, having seen the strains already evident in the movement from many other sources, I am inclined to say that the views represented in the article are probably fairly representative in their portrayal.

And, ultimately, this is the real lesson for Tea Partiers themselves: get your act together, if you want to be taken seriously. While it's easy (at first) to define yourselves and your movement as being against someone (Barack Obama) or even some specific political philosophy (Democrats' taxing or budgeting priorities); to succeed in American politics, you're eventually going to have to define what you are for and not just what you are against. This is a lesson the Republican Party is grappling with currently, without much visible success so far.

Which is one reason the leaders of the Republican Party are so terrified of the Tea Party movement -- because a takeover of Republicans by this vocal faction would result in even less coherence, in terms of what they stand for.

Now, to be fair, the Tea Party "strikecott" may be more effective than it appears at the moment. And they may actually start agreeing on the core issues of "what we stand for" -- in other words, their convention might be a smashing success in bringing them together ideologically.

But when you call for a mass demonstration and nobody notices (on the other hand), it exposes your group's true size, and true power -- and not in a positive way. If you flop on the national media stage too many times, then you will be taken less seriously as a result, not more seriously. Which is the main risk of calling for such actions in the first place.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant