David0616You cannot understand American politics today without understanding the Tea Party movement. Especially after last Tuesday’s Republican primaries, everyone from the president and the speaker of the House down to the voting citizen should get a handle on it. Get it wrong, and you get everything wrong. It is a truly American movement. It is popular in origin, protective of property, rooted in the Founding, and morally serious.

The movement began as a protest against exponentially more-than-usual runaway government spending. The Washington Post’s David Montgomery traces it back to Mary Rakovich, an unemployed middle-aged automotive engineer, standing outside a Fort Myers stadium in Florida on February 10, 2009, protesting the president’s $787 billion stimulus bill that he was promoting at a “town hall meeting.” It was just Mary and her husband, a handful of co-belligerents, and a cooler full of water. The sun was cruel, but providence was smiling. Fox News called to invite her to be interviewed on Neil Cavuto’s show. Similar protests began budding in other cities.

About a week later, CNBC’s Rick Santelli accidentally provided the movement with a name in a rant from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade:

“I have an idea. The new administration’s big on computers and technology. How about this, president and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages or would we like to, at least, buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have the chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people than could carry the water instead of drink the water.”

At the end of this clip, notice that Santelli refers to our nation’s founders: “If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we’re doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.” He claims that what the government is doing in its attempt to solve the current economic crisis is not only economically foolish, but also politically a betrayal of our founding principles.

In the middle of all this, Santelli mentions offhandedly, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July.” From all that he says, it is clear that he has in mind a protest against not only the high levels of government spending by the new Obama administration, but also the counter-productivity, political infidelity, and moral injustice of it. Then it took off.

Twenty-seven percent of the country supports the Tea Party movement, according to a May Washington Post/ABC poll. Anyone like Paul Krugman who dismisses Tea Party activists as “crazy” and as an “AstroTurf” movement, i.e., a fake grassroots movement, is arguing away an incoming electoral missile, and will likely soon be doing the same with his demise in the political hereafter.