BOSTON — Several thousand people gathered Wednesday morning on the sun-splashed Boston Common to hear Sarah Palin pay homage to the Tea Party movement and the original revolutionary events that inspired it.

“You’re sounding the warning bell, just like what happened with that midnight run,” Ms. Palin, wearing a bright red jacket, told the crowd. Hundreds of yellow flags bearing the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me” waved in the gentle breeze in front of her, along with hundreds of American flags.

“Get your second wind, America!” she added later, the first wind presumably having come in 1773, when the colonists, rebelling at taxation without representation, dumped the tea from British ships into Boston Harbor.

Protesters on the fringes of Wednesday’s event created a circus-like atmosphere, but the core crowd of Tea Party backers here was largely attentive and respectful.

Karen Gareau, 46, a dental hygienist, and her friend Gayle Jendzejec, 47, who owns a consulting firm, were sitting in lawn chairs they brought from home in Rhode Island. “The government needs to go on a big fiscal diet,” Ms. Gareau said, noting with a laugh that she was saying this while eating a sausage McMuffin.

Mike Seaver, 31, an architect apprentice in Boston who was wearing a corduroy jacket and drinking coffee from Starbucks, said he came for “the collective energy of people who are frustrated with the president.”

Ms. Palin said that President Obama’s policies, like the economic stimulus package, would lead to “un-American results.”

“I’m not calling anyone un-American,” she told the crowd. “But the unintended consequences of these actions — the results — are un-American.” She added: “I want to tell ‘em, nah, we’ll keep clinging to our Constitution and our guns and religion — and you can keep the change.” She was referring to a comment Mr. Obama made during the presidential campaign about people in economically depressed areas clinging to their guns and religion.

At the rally, several people were carrying old campaign signs for Scott Brown, the Republican who became a Tea Party mascot in January after his upset win of the Senate seat long held by Edward M. Kennedy.

No one who was interviewed said they were sorry that Mr. Brown had skipped the rally. They noted he was in Washington doing “the people’s business,” specifically working on a nuclear treaty with Iran.

His absence was also a pragmatic political move; if he runs again for the Senate in 2012, he will need the support of this state’s independents and others who may be cool to Ms. Palin’s brand of conservatism.

Support for Ms. Palin may be more intense in other regions of the country than in New England, home to some of the Republican party’s remaining moderates. Several Republican candidates did not attend the rally, including Charles Baker, who is hoping to win the party’s nomination for governor. And several people at the rally said that while they liked Ms. Palin, they were not sure they would vote for her if she ran for president in 2012.

Ms. Palin mostly followed her by-now-familiar script as she lauded the Tea Party movement.

“It’s not about dividing America, and it’s not about one individual politician,” she said. “This is about the people.”

One of her biggest applause lines came when she called for more drilling for oil and gas. “Yeah, let’s drill, baby, drill,” she declared, reviving a favorite campaign slogan, “not stall, baby, stall.”

“You say it, Sarah!” James Mirisola, 42, a sales engineer from Hanover who took the day off to see Ms. Palin, cheered as he hoisted a yellow flag.

He said later he would vote for her because he wanted to stop the new federal health care law, limit the size of government and stop what he said was the “free ride” that illegal immigrants get.

The Tea Party Express heads to Washington on Thursday for a rally coinciding with the day taxes are due.