“It’s a mealy-mouthed sop to the tea party movement that is rife with platitudes and little on substance,” emailed Andrew Ian Dodge, the Maine state coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots national coalition of local groups. “I have yet to see one person who is wholly impressed with it.”

Judson Phillips, founder of the Tea Party Nation online social network, called it “a nice P.R. piece, but I don’t think it is even showing up on our radar.” Most tea partiers, he said, “are skeptical.”…

For instance, the Pledge makes no mention of eliminating federal agencies tea partiers see as wasteful, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the departments of energy, commerce and education. In addition, its call to roll back government spending to its 2008 level has been blasted by tea partiers as insignificant.