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A man holds up a tea kettle during an Atlanta Tea Party tax protest in April 2009. John Bazemore/AP hide caption

A man holds up a tea kettle during an Atlanta Tea Party tax protest in April 2009.

It was February of 2009. President Obama had been in office less than a full month. His approval rating was over 60 and nearly 60% of the House and Senate seats were held by Democrats. The country seem poised on the edge of a new era, perhaps even another New Deal.

Not a few mainstream Republicans believed their party needed to do some serious soul-searching, house-cleaning and image-adjusting. A task force at the Republican National Committee was hard at work on just such a set of recommendations.

But there was another spirit in the land as well. In Washington state, which had easily gone for the Democrats in November, travelers on Interstate 5 could see a huge billboard reading: "Give me God, guns and gold and you can keep the change." The reference to Obama's 2008 "hope and change" theme could not have been clearer.

That same spirit of determined pushback was evident in plenty of other places, coast to coast, and it got more visible as the weeks went by.

Before Obama had been in office for a month, much of the nation saw an astonishing meltdown by cable TV personality Rick Santelli, an investment analyst on business news network CNBC.

For close to three minutes, Santelli harangued the live host and other on-air contributors with a fiery denunciation of the Obama plan to help homeowners whose property was worth less than its mortgage.

Santelli referred to "paying losers' mortgages" and strongly implied the program beneficiaries had no one but themselves to blame for their situation.

But then he uttered the magic phrase that altered the course of politics, if not history, on that chilly morning: "We're thinking about having a Chicago tea party in July," he shouted. "All you capitalists that wanna show up to Lake Michigan. I'm gonna start organizing."

Continued here:
6 Years Ago At CPAC Meeting, The Tea Party Movement Ignited