We had a conversation about this in the comments recently. The tea party is so closely associated now with its opposition to the Obama administration’s conservative, private industry-based health-insurance reform law that the rage mobs’ true genesis has become obscured.
We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.
– CNBC’s Rick Santelli on Feb. 19, 2009
In fact, the government proposal — it was never acted upon — that so agitated middle-aged, middle-class white Republicans that they finally got up off their couches and flooded the nation’s parks and streets was a plan floated by the Obama administration that would have used taxpayer dollars to help mortgage-holders who were underwater.
It was not explicit then, but on a dog-whistle level, there was undercurrent beneath the outrage that suggested that what really had these nascent tea partyists so agitated was a paranoid suspicion that the nation’s first black president, who’d just been inaugurated three weeks earlier, was creating the mortgage-relief program as a back-door reparations program for African-Americans.
Writing in the Washington Post yesterday, Ezra Klein recalls the rant by CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s against the proposed mortgage program, a tirade that lit the tea party bonfires nationwide:
[…]
As you read through the Reuters story 
There is so much wrong with 
