I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal too [in fact I think a lot of people would be, if they took the time to think about it], but I don't think the Tea Party is a good fit. Sure, they call themselves fiscally conservative, but then they scream "keep your hands off my Medicare!" in the next breath. They're really more the "I got mine so fuck you" party.
The real tragedy that's going on here is that the Libertarians and Greens aren't capitalizing on the Tea Party and Occupy movements (respectively), and then forming a coalition.
I'll agree in part and disagree in part. I'm an informal (deliberate-lowercase) tea partier myself; I've many friends who count themselves the same. To a man, we all want to simply be left the hell alone, and are perfectly willing (nay, eager!) to give up Medicare, Social Security, etc., though we would prefer to keep the premiums we pay for those services and save/invest them for our future needs.
The media doesn't interview us, though.
The tea party is a marvelously robust and dynamic crowd, sharing many values with the occupy (again deliberate) crowd. The media and the political class like to quantize the people into easily-defined camps; as the great-grandparent poster noted, it's a multivariate problem even after simplification. You're right in complaining that the Libertarians and Greens aren't capitalizing on the movements (not respectively, as there's a fair degree of overlap), but the real problem is that the Republicans are co-opting the Tea Party (deliberate caps) movement (and, to a lesser degree, the Democrats are co-opting the Occupy movement).
The fundamental problem is--again, as GGP poster said--the reduction to a Boolean variable. Reality doesn't fit neatly into black-and-white, but black-and-white is the easiest thing for people to understand. Black or white; is or isn't; with us or against us. It's Duckspeak in its purest form. The real problem is that thinking is hard. I've known people who will spend ten hours a day doing backbreaking physical labor in the heat of an Oklahoma summer's day, but if you try to spend two minutes engaging them in thought, they give up. Thinking is harder than just about anything else man has conceived. I don't discount myself: I can run two miles and feel energized, but after a day of hard work at my terminal, sitting in a comfortable chair in an air-conditioned office, I'm ready for a beer and a good night's sleep.
I seem to be drifting. To return to the point: the real issue is that the system propagates the black-and-white myth, when reality recognizes not only shades of gray, but an entire spectrum of color. Try getting the media to report on that; there's talk of the Fairness Doctrine--try getting the babbling class to recognize that "fairness" required not one opposing commentator, but hundreds, if not thousands, all differing subtly, and most with at least some degree of validity.