How serious could the anti-ObamaCare protests get?

Over the weekend, tens of thousands of people marched through Washington protesting against President Obama's health-care reforms. Co-ordinated by the conservative Freedomworks, an organisation which calls for lower taxes and smaller government, the protests saw demonstrators bearing flags saying, "Don't tread on me!", "Enough, enough" and "I'm not your ATM".

But how serious could these protests be for the Obama administration? And is there a danger they could intensify?

The health-care reform act is a subject that has split America right down the middle. Some feel that it is a reform that would benefit millions without health insurance, but others see it as the first step in Obama's vision for a socialist United States.

Many of the protesters over the weekend had posters of the President in extreme portrayals, such as a terrorist or a Hitler-esque figure. The idea that the reform is a socialist or communist action is one that has led several groups to state that the country is heading further away from what the founding fathers had in mind.

The BBC recently spoke to Las Vegas-based pawn broker called Glen Parshall who believes that Obama was slowly turning America into a socialist state and quoted Thomas Jefferson in order to defend his point.

"We've got someone who is an out-and-out Marxist, a total socialist, who is trying to put everything under government control," Mr Parshall was quoted as saying.

"There's a lot of people that are rising up. If they don't start conforming to our constitution, we may have to rise up in arms and take our country back." He then quoted Jefferson's famous statement "The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" to back up his point.

Now, Mr Parshall may be in the minority but it does show the fervour that the health-care debate has stirred and the lengths to which many feel it is merely the first step in some sort of attempted government coup. Many of the health-care town hall meetings saw anti-Obama activists bearing guns, afraid that Obama's next step would be to take away their "right to bear arms".

The BBC's North American editor Mark Mardell said in his most recent blog that some of the protests don't just seem to be about health-care but what they feel the President now stands for and what it means for their vision of American.

"... his espousal of views alien to their vision of America amounts to an unpatriotic betrayal. Listening to the (tax payer's tea party) on the radio over the weekend it struck me that if I was reading a transcript blind of context, I would assume I was listening to a demonstration of a growing resistance to a brutal and undemocratic regime."

"Indeed, in the four or five speeches I heard on the radio, details of tax rises and health care were hardly mentioned: the theme was "recapturing America" from "tyranny" and regaining "freedom". It sounded as if they were protesting against a coup, probably a violent one, rather than the natural consequence of losing an election less than a year ago."

However, while the right-wing groups may be gaining support, they are not the only ones. Last week, when Republican congressman Joe Wilson heckled the President Obama by shouting out "You lie!" during his address to Congress last week, he saw donations of over $1 million from anti-Obama activists who thought he was justified in his reaction. However, his Democratic opponent in South Carolina, Rob Miller, has also enjoyed a similar influx of political donations showing that while the anti-Obama protesters may be stealing the headlines, they're not dominating the landscape.

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