Potential Audience

I'm always on the lookout for stories which feature the type of people our message might reach to good effect. I think this item from a story on the tea party movement qualifies:

But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated — even manufactured — by both parties to grab power.

She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. “I was like, ‘Did I really just do that?’ ” she recalled.

FWIW I don't think the story as a whole captures the essence of the tea party movement but it's interesting to see snapshots of some of the people involved (even if the ones they pick aren't necessarily representative of the majority).