If conservatives want to guarantee permanent control of Congress for Nancy Pelosi and re-election for Barack Obama in 2012, one great way to help them towards that goal is for conservatives to appear to the average voter as a bunch of angry crackpots. Unfortunately, this seems to be the unofficial theme of this weekend's "National Tea Party Convention".

Exhibit One:

"I have a dream," he [WorldNutDaily founder Joseph Farah] said. "And my dream is that If Barack Obama even seeks re-election as president in 2012 that he won't be able to go to any city, any town, any hamlet in America without seeing signs that ask 'Where's the Birth Certificate?'"

(According to this account, Andrew Breitbart was at the convention, and forcefully argued against the birthers. So there was at least one adult in the room.)

Exhibit Two:

On Thursday night, giving the opening address, former U.S. representative Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who ran for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination as an anti-immigration candidate, railed against Obama and "the cult of multiculturalism." Americans could be "boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state," he said. "People who couldn't even spell the word 'vote,' or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House."

When Tancredo said, "His name is Barack Hussein Obama," the audience booed loudly.

Come on, the contemptuous reciting of the President's middle name was played out in 2008. And attacking people who don't speak English well, many of whom are citizens or legal residents of the United States, will turn off many voters as mean-spirited and divisive. You don't win elections by division, you win by addition.

It's perfectly legitimate to point out Obama's left-wing ideology, but tone and presentation are vitally important in building a majority political coalition. (A majority of Democrats polled by Gallup say they have a positive view of socialism, so Democrats can't turn around and claim "socialist" is some kind of smear.)

This may be a way for a few hundred people in a meeting room in Nashville to feel better; it is not any way to build a majority of voters to throw Pelosi and company out of their leadership positions. Of course the DeMSM are going to try to portray all conservatives as angry, intolerant fringe figures. But there's nothing to be gained by helping them do it.

Angry rants, purity tests, conspiracy theories, etc. from the right, all help Democrats get re-elected and maintain their majority. No doubt there are a lot of good people at the convention who have legitimate concerns about the continuing damage the Democrats have planned for America. But politics is about building a majority coalition in order to win elections. The Tea Party movement can't lose sight of that fact and succeed.