By Linda Feldmann
Staff writer, CSMonitor

(AXcess News) - Heather Gass always felt she had to suppress her conservative views, living as she did in the liberal San Francisco Bay area. A year ago that all changed.

CNBC financial reporter Rick Santelli had just blasted the Obama administration's plan to help homeowners facing foreclosure, and called for a "tea party" protest in Chicago. The idea caught fire around the country, and soon Ms. Gass, a 40-something real estate agent, was organizing weekly street-corner demonstrations in her hometown of Orinda, Calif.

Her focus was fiscal discipline, aimed not just at the $75 billion mortgage bailout but also the administration's $787 billion stimulus package and President Obama's budget. She remembers her first signs well: "Stop printing money" and "China owns us." By Congress's summer recess, when opposition to Mr. Obama's healthcare plan burst forth, she had 100 people protesting on street corners, she says.

Fast-forward to February 2010. Gass is still out there every Friday, her 6-year-old son in tow. Political operatives are calling her up for advice. Her roster of influential tea party activists - "Heather's list," as local politicos call it - is creating buzz. "We're not dangerous," says Gass. "We're your neighbors. But we've been underground. We're not underground anymore."

Gass says she's beyond anger over the direction of the country and is in "action mode." Whatever it's called, that intensity of feeling - the passion that led her to travel last month to the Tea Party Convention in Nashville and that drives her to tears when she worries out loud about the America her son's generation will inherit - is unmistakable.

Heather Gasses exist all around the country, ordinary American conservatives who are fed up and leading the charge. There's frustration on the left, too - aimed not only at the Republican Party, for hindering Obama's agenda, but also at Wall Street and its "no-limits-casino banking culture," as liberal blogger Arianna Huffington writes on her Huffington Post website.

She and other leaders on the populist left, such as the Rev. Jim Wallis, are urging people to move their money from "too big to fail" banks into community banks.

There's also disaffection among moderates, frustrated by the high degree of political polarization that leaves little room for compromise on major policy matters. But efforts in the last decade to build a "radical middle" movement - a drive to marry the best ideas of the right and left - seem to have faded.

The stunning decision by Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana, one of the Senate's few moderates, not to run for reelection cast the hollowing-out of the middle in sharp relief.

On the extreme edge, some people have even been moved to violence - like Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 18.

So what does this all add up to? Are we "mad as hell," like TV anchor Howard Beale ranting to viewers in the 1976 Hollywood classic "Network"? Is today's real-life incarnation, Glenn Beck of Fox News, whipping us into a frenzy of revolt against Washington?

Not necessarily. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that 75 percent of Americans are "angry," but his question is framed solely around anger: "How angry are you at the current policies of the federal government?" Forty-five percent replied "very angry" and 30 percent said "somewhat angry."

But when Americans are given a choice of "angry," "dissatisfied," "satisfied," or "enthusiastic" about the way the federal government works, "dissatisfied" is the most popular choice at 48 percent, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll. An additional 19 percent chose "angry."

This net negative of 67 percent doesn't come close to the same poll's finding in October 1992, during the last time of political turmoil over fiscal policy. Then, 25 percent of Americans were angry, and 56 percent were dissatisfied, per ABC. A month later, third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot won 19 percent of the vote and cost President George H.W. Bush a second term.

In 1992, unemployment had peaked at 7.8 percent - well below today's level - and yet voters then were angrier than they are today. So it's not just about unemployment. "Consider also the duration of the downturn, the tenure of the administration, the level of effort, the sense of empathy, and other atmospherics," says Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News.

Obama emerged from his post-inaugural honeymoon long ago, but he's still only 13 months in office. If the public remains unhappy with the economy and with his administration's recovery efforts, anger could rise. As things stand today, the Democrats already could lose well more than 24 House seats this November, the post-World War II average loss for the president's party in midterm elections.

For now, the angriest bloc of voters is conservatives, at 32 percent, according to ABC. Ten percent of liberals and 12 percent of moderates are angry. Higher levels of anger and declines in job approval for Obama could point to greater-than-average losses in November, potentially even the loss of Democratic control on Capitol Hill. Nonpartisan political handicapper Charlie Cook already predicts the Democrats will lose the House.

But eight months before the midterms, Obama and the Democrats still have time to regroup. During President Reagan's first two years in office, the recession was deep and persistent - with unemployment matching today's levels - and yet the Republicans lost only 26 seats in the 1982 midterms, just above average. Perhaps Reagan's sunny persona helped. And having taken office on a wave of anti-incumbent feeling, defeating President Carter in the process, Reagan managed to maintain an outsider's aura long into his tenure, which may also have helped stave off worse losses in the first midterm.

Obama, too, has a loyal base of support that has largely stuck by him during his tough first year, even as less-committed independent voters have peeled away. But if anger continues to rise across the board, the outcome in voting booths could be far worse for Democrats.

Every disaffected voter has his or her own story. Gass calls her new activism an "awakening," an acknowledgment of a nagging feeling she always knew was there, but was too busy to act upon. Now she feels she has no choice. "We have borrowed and spent our way into the biggest black hole," she says, "and we are heading into the abyss."

Obama supporters who speak in less-than-glowing terms about the status quo can be described more as disaffected than angry.

"I think the biggest disappointment is that politicians on both sides are looking out for their best interests instead of where the country needs to be," says J.P. Arena, a social worker in Massachusetts, who describes himself as a left-leaning Independent.

"Whether it's Obama, whether it's Republicans, people aren't putting the needs of the country first." Mr. Arena says Obama still has his support "for now, but it's a tentative support."

Then there are the Obama supporters who are giving up altogether - and leaving the country. Susan and Fred Klopfer, lifelong Democrats from Mount Pleasant, Iowa, are moving to Mexico in September. Mr. Klopfer, a psychiatrist with the state Department of Human Services, accepted early retirement after learning that his facility was closing in June.

Mrs. Klopfer says once he retires, they won't be able to afford the $1,800 per month she estimates their healthcare will cost - if they could get coverage at all, given preexisting conditions. She doesn't completely understand Obama's healthcare proposals, but it doesn't matter now. They're leaving.

"My husband and I lost 40 percent of our retirement savings, and we'll never see it again," she says. "If we had a Congress that was doing its job and safeguarding and protecting the investment environment, we could have used the retirement we had saved....

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