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Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Tim Pawlenty the former governor of Minnesota, speaking at the CPAC conference in Washington.

Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, has scored a 2012 coup of sorts: He will be the keynote speaker at the first Tea Party Policy Summit in Arizona this month.

In a release Friday morning, the Tea Party Patriots announced that Mr. Pawlenty, who is actively considering a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, will address the group, along with Representative Ron Paul of Texas and other conservative politicians and activists.

“With more than 3,000 affiliated organizations across the county, this summit will be an important opportunity for Tea Party Patriots to come together to celebrate and recommit to the ideals and values that are responsible for the dramatic victories in the November election,” Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, said in a statement.

As the Republican presidential nomination fight gets under way, many of the potential candidates are eagerly vying for the attention and support of Tea Party groups, who emerged in 2010 as a powerful force in elective politics.

Mr. Pawlenty remains largely unknown around the country, and has been seeking to raise his profile with a nationwide tour to promote his new book, “Courage to Stand.” A political memoir, the book details his eight years as governor.

“This Tea Party group is a great champion for tax and spending cuts — something Governor Pawlenty feels strongly about,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for Mr. Pawlenty. “Governor Pawlenty is looking forward to sharing his lessons learned from winning tough battles with the liberals and public employees’ unions in Minnesota.”

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The first issue of the Tea Party Review, which describes itself as “the first national magazine for, by, and about the Tea Party movement,” will make its debut during the Conservative Political Action Conference scheduled to begin in Washington on Thursday.

“People are weary of the distorted version of the Tea Party movement that we see in most of the media,” said Katrina Pierson, a member of the Dallas Tea Party and the “national grassroots director” for the new magazine. “Throughout American history, successful movements — abolitionists, women’s suffragists, the civil rights movement, the conservative movement, et cetera — all had their own print publications.”

The monthly magazine, which will charge $34.95 for an annual subscription, comes from Higher Standard Publishers, a movement-oriented publishing house behind conservative titles like, “Confessions of a Black Conservative,” and a children’s book called, “Help, Mom! Radicals are Ruining My Country!”

Last week, another organization, called the Tea Party News Brief launched a Web site from offices in Des Moines claiming to be “the nation’s first nonpartisan news service for the Tea Party Movement.”

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Vin Weber was in the vanguard of conservative change before some Tea Party activists were born; he won a House seat from Minnesota in the 1980 Republican revolution led by then-President Ronald Reagan. He worked alongside Newt Gingrich in the years-long effort to break the Democrats’ grip on the House. Now a prominent Washington lobbyist, he spoke with John Harwood of The Times and CNBC about the new Republican majority in the House. Here’s a condensed, edited version of their conversation:

You’ve now seen three waves of Republican revolutionaries come to town. Compare this group to the previous groups.

The Reagan revolution really changed the Republican Party as much as anything. Ronald Reagan turned it into a much more ideological conservative party and it hasn’t really changed since then. The main difference with this group and the group that came in with Gingrich in 1995 is that we have a fairly experienced bunch of people that will be running the House. In 1995, no Republican House member had ever served in the majority. Now we’ve got a Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who was a committee chairman in the majority. Most of the major committee chairmen are people who have served in the majority on their committees. So they are much more, if you will, sophisticated. Their sense of what’s possible, given that they only control one body, is more mature.

More competent leadership?

I think that’s fair to say by virtue of experience — not smarter leadership, but they’ve been around. They’ve seen the mistakes of the past, and they’re not going to make those mistakes again.

How does it change how the House operates to have a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president?

Well, first of all, the relationship between incoming speaker Boehner and Republican leader McConnell in the Senate is an excellent relationship, There was a lot of friction between Speaker Gingrich and Senator Dole as majority leader.

No danger that these two are going to run for president against each other.

No danger of that at all. That relationship is going to be very pivotal. Republicans can accomplish some things only if the House and Senate Republicans can work well together. On the other hand, Harry Reid is still the majority leader. It’s not nearly as powerful a position as being Speaker of the House, but he is the majority leader and he has the ability to protect the Democrat agenda to a certain extent.

To what degree is the tax-cut deal forged at the end of 2010 a precursor for what’s going to happen in 2011 and 2012?

Both parties are going to have to figure out what it is that they really care about. The Republicans on the tax cut deal said what they really care about is maintaining the current rates and not allowing any of the rates to go up, and they gave up on other things. The president apparently got what he thought was most important too — the extension of unemployment benefits and things like that. Republicans are not going to be able to get everything they want, but if they set their priorities and decide this is what we clearly care about most, there’s a chance they can accomplish part of their agenda and we won’t face a shutdown of the government like we did in the 1990’s.

What’s the biggest challenge facing Speaker Boehner to get results and manage the expectations of the Tea Party movement?

I don’t think his biggest problem is going to be his own members. They are a pretty sophisticated group. His biggest problem and the Republican Party’s biggest problem is out in grass-roots — the Tea Party movement that got all these people elected, that has all this energy has probably got unrealistic expectations about what this new Republican House can accomplish for them.

What will the activists be expecting that they can’t achieve?

They want to see big reductions in the deficit and the debt, and that can’t happen unless we get serious entitlement reform — which was not discussed in the last campaign, frankly, by either party. If you’re really going to deal with the long-term debt of the country, you’re going to deal with popular programs, Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security. I think that’s going to be difficult.

Is that going to be possible before the 2012 election?

I think the president has an opening to make that happen now. The deficit reduction commission gives an opening. If the president wants to take that and lead with that in the state of the union message, I think that he could make substantial progress on a growth-oriented, but revenue-raising tax reform and probably on a Social Security reform that will probably save a lot of money and put that program on a sound basis.

You once were a Republican revolutionary. Now you’re part of the establishment. Is the Tea Party movement coming after you and people like you all across Washington?

Sure. They’re looking at a system in Washington — the government, the bureaucracy, the lobbying community, the news media, everybody else, and they’re saying this isn’t working. This whole system has given us a massive expansion of government, which many of them believe is unconstitutional. They’re trying to change the whole thing. I think it’s a healthy movement. The main thing is, the Republicans have to help them to understand that with a Democrat president and a Democrat Senate there is a limit to how much they can control.

No one should expect Washington to change too much?

Washington does change, but it’s going to change slowly. The whole constitution was written to make sure we don’t have dramatic radical change in this country. So we will see an evolutionary change.

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Even as it nears a critical vote in Congress today, the compromise tax deal worked out by President Obama and Republicans on Capitol Hill has some new enemies.

Conservatives.

Last week, the agreement was assailed by liberals who accused the president of giving away the store by agreeing to a temporary extension of tax breaks and reductions in the estate tax, both of which will benefit the wealthy.

But with a critical procedural vote scheduled for Monday afternoon in the Senate, some Tea Party activists and other conservative pundits are attacking it from the other side.

A group called the Tea Party Patriots is circulating a petition accusing Republican lawmakers of cutting a bad backroom deal with the president that violates the principles that Tea Party candidates campaigned on in the midterm elections.

“’The Deal’ revives the death tax, an immoral ‘vampire tax’ that sucks the blood from the dead, ruins family businesses and double taxes savings that were accumulated over a lifetime,” the petition says. “‘The Deal’ spends billions and billions of dollars that the country does not have in order to prevent a tax hike that the country voted against.”

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host, said the tax deal “should not happen.” On his show Friday, Mr. Limbaugh blasted the Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill for giving in too much to Mr. Obama.

“The economic benefit here, if we do this deal, is going to be minimal,” Mr. Limbaugh said, insisting that Republicans should have fought for the permanent extension of the tax cuts rather than giving in to a temporary one. “Where is the Republican vision?”

Erik Erickson, the conservative blogger, wrote at Redstate.com that the “deal must now die.”

“It must now be opposed by Republicans,” Mr. Erickson wrote. “Released now in print, the legislation is loaded up with budget-busting pork of ridiculously absurd levels.”

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, appears to agree with Mr. Limbaugh. In a Twitter message, she endorsed the position of Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, who has criticized the compromise.

The Twitter message from a conservative commentator said, “Thank you, @JimDeMint — DeMint comes out against tax deal, says G.O.P. must do better than this.”

And Charles Krauthammer, the conservative columnist for The Washington Post, wrote in his last column that Mr. Obama and the Democrats had gotten more than people realized in the deal.

“Obama is no fool,” Mr. Krauthammer wrote. “While getting Republicans to boost his own re-election chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, Tea Party, this-time-we’re-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.”

The Tea Party petition echoes many of the criticisms that disaffected liberals hurled at Mr. Obama after he took office and started negotiating with Congress to advance his agenda. Some of the accusations could easily have been written about Mr. Obama’s health care fight.

“This ‘backroom deal’ ignores those who voted for principled leadership on Election Day,” said Mark Meckler, the national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots. “Americans demand transparency in the legislative process and policies that reflect fiscal responsibility — not secret negotiations and weak compromise.”

Will the carping from the right make a difference in the bill’s chances? That’s hard to imagine, given the louder chorus of praise for the compromise from Republican lawmakers who will vote as early as today.

But keeping your base satisfied is tough, as President Obama discovered during his first two years in office. And in the House, especially, it looks like Republicans will have to be quite united behind the legislation if many Democrats abandon the president.

Stay tuned for the voting.

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