The St. Pete Times reports that U.S. Senate candidate Marco Rubio’s rise is linked to the Tea Party, beginning as far back as 2007 when campaigned to be speaker of the Florida House.
According the St. Pete Times, the Tea Party is considered by many to have started when a laid-off auto worker who moved to Florida and staged a small protest Feb. 10, 2009, at Obama’s rally for the stimulus in Fort Myers. This took place nine days before CNBC commentator Rick Santelli’s lively discourse that invoked the historic term and became a YouTube sensation, with more than a million views.
However, the paper believes its genesis was two years earlier.
Read more.