Yesterday, Michael Steele held a private meeting with several Tea Party leaders at RNC headquarters. However, WaPo's Dana Milbank reports that the RNC still isn't willing to get too close to the teabaggers just yet. Seems they wanted to hold a news conference afterwards at the National Republican Club. But the RNC said no.
"They wouldn't allow it," said Karin Hoffman, the grass-roots activist who organized the meeting.
The tea partiers were out in the cold -- 21 degrees with the wind chill, to be exact. They held their news conference, sans Steele, on the sidewalk across from the Capitol South Metro entrance.
"You guys are all frozen," Hoffman observed as she greeted the shivering camera crews and reporters after her session. The meeting itself, she said, was "healthy," if not conclusive. "It's the beginning of a relationship."
Milbank confirms what most of us already know--Steele and friends are caught between a rock and a hard place. They don't want to get too close to them given the extremist bile we've all seen from them--but they don't want to risk more Doug Hoffmans.
How well did it go? Hard to say. According to Milbank, while the 50 or so teabaggers who met with Steele for four hours acknowledged being heard. In fact, the meeting was supposed to last an hour, but ended up taking four hours. But apparently, the reluctance to fully embrace each other is mutual.
The RNC solved the pinkie-raising problem by serving, in addition to the tea, soft drinks and cookies. The second set of problems won't be settled quite so easily.
Asked by reporters whether they were all leaving the meeting as loyal Republicans, the tea party activists answered with shouts of "No! No! . . . Loyal Americans! . . . Citizens! . . . Conservatives!"
And apparently the meeting wasn't enough to keep Nevada teabaggers from going forward with their plan to field their own candidate against Harry Reid in November.
If I'm reading Milbank right, Steele probably breathed a sigh of relief after this was over. Although he says he's a tea partier, apparently that only applies as long as he's not caught with them on the network newscasts.