Michael Steele To Tea Partiers: Come On Home

At a press conference yesterday, RNC Chair Michael Steele announced plans to tell all of America how hard his party is working to prevent the Democrats from passing health care reform. One goal, he said, was to tell Democrats that they had squandered whatever chance of a bipartisan reform they once had. But, the other audience Steele addressed was a little closer to home.

Tea partiers, Steele said, it's time to come back to the Republican Party.

Recent weeks have seen the beginnings of an internal crisis for the GOP, with the extreme right threatening to tear apart the party's tenuous coalition of business and social conservatives. Last week the civil war came to a head in a Rasmussen poll showing a hypothetical "Tea Party" beating the GOP on a generic Congressional ballot, splitting the Republican vote just enough to give the Democrats a win.

At the press conference yesterday, Steele unveiled a new, more in-your-face model for GOP activism torn right from the tea party playbook. In addition to the radio ads, Steele announced a new grassroots organizing program on health care that will send Republican activists to six states with the moderate Democratic senators targeted by the Tea Partiers. The goal, Steele said, will be for the GOP to help outraged voters get their message across to the Democrats that he says dismisses the voices heard at the tea parties and the August health care town halls.

"We've seen arrogance displayed" by the Democrats, Steele said. "The Democratic party is consumed by their own monopoly of power."

Steele said the Democrats have dismissed the tea partiers and town hallers as "different" and "un-American." In short, they're not listening. Fortunately, Steele is there to remedy the situation. His grassroots plan is called the GOP's "National Listen To Me" program -- and it does pretty much what it says. "We're letting the voters say 'listen to me," he said.

The RNC released a web video today as part of that "Listen" campaign, using photos of tea party protests. "Americans are standing up and speaking out," the ad says. "Yet President Obama and Democrats ignore the voices of millions of Americans."

Though he reached out to the tea partiers in language familiar to them, inviting them to let the GOP facilitate their protests, Steele also reiterated the difficulty his party has dealing with the growing conservative movement in America. Asked by a reporter if his party will punish any Republican that votes for the current health care reform bills in Congress, Steele bobbed and weaved, refusing to answer directly. That's not the kind of answer most tea partiers are looking for -- they've turned away from the Republican Party precisely because they say it refuses enforce purity on the issues that matter to them. That puts Steele, who wants to expand the party's base in all regions of the country, not just the red ones, in a tough spot. So yesterday, he offered the tea partiers a home in the GOP, but also seemed to remind them that in his house, they'll have to play by his rules.