Dana Milbank reports on the meeting between RNC chairman, Michael Steele, and a contingent of Tea Party leaders.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele treated tea party leaders like an ugly date Tuesday afternoon: They were good enough to take upstairs, but not good enough to be seen with in public.
No media, no cameras. After all, who wants to be caught on camera shagging an ugly date? So the partiers were forced to hold their post-date press conference outside RNC headquarters.
Republican leaders, probably wary of TV footage showing a tea party takeover of RNC headquarters, denied the activists' request to use the facility for the news conference they had planned for afterward.
"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."
Pretty chilly relationship, from the look of it. Maybe an arranged marriage is the most either Party can expect?
