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As the Tea Party movement was taking shape before the 2010 midterms, the issue that kept it from immediately embracing the Republican Party was the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), or the bank bailout. And even though the GOP has gone to great lengths to draw in Tea Party activists since then, it was not always an easy union.

In fact, Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, told National Journal in the fall of 2009 that Republicans in Congress who had voted for bailouts could expect primary challenges.

Leaders and rank-and-file members of Congress, on both sides of the aisle, spoke with contempt about TARP during the run-up to the 2008 election, but a push from national economists on its necessity swayed enough of them to act. And even if they found it distasteful, key Republicans such as John Boehner and John McCain helped it to pass.

In fact, just about all of the leading contenders in the current GOP presidential race begrudgingly encouraged Congress to fund the bailout. The one exception is Ron Paul. (Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, who are lagging in the polls, opposed it.)

Support for TARP may help explain why GOP voters have been so resistant to coalescing around one standard-bearer for the presidential race, conservative strategists and Tea Party leaders have told RealClearPolitics.

Those who backed TARP in the fall of 2008 included Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry. Even Herman Cain, who ended his presidential bid on Saturday, believed bailing out the banks was the responsible course of action. And when John Thune was contemplating a presidential run, one of the most complicating factors for him, advisers and political operatives said, was his “TARP problem.” (In other words, he voted for it.)

Meckler agreed that this has created something of a predicament for the GOP: “I think there are many factors which make it ‘difficult’ [to coalesce behind one nominee]. TARP is definitely among them. TARP-like opportunities no doubt arise in the future. The question remains . . . have they learned anything?”

The answer to his question is mixed.

Romney wrote in his book “No Apology” that the bailouts prevented the downward economic spiral from becoming worse. In 2010, he wrote that the legislation “was right for the country” but added that it was administered poorly. “It should be shut down,” he wrote.

Of course, that’s the kind of answer that Romney has given about health care reform in Massachusetts: It was the right thing to do and the right thing for his state, but the Democratic-controlled legislature and successive administration that implemented it botched the effort.