So the RNC hosted a briefing and getting-to-know-you session for the Online Right yesterday, attended by party chieftain Reince Priebus and (at least for a while) the Big Man himself, Mitt Romney. It’s unclear from the BuzzFeed report on the event who exactly ran it, but GOP online communications guru Patrick Hynes apparently organized it, and it was obviously intended to get the Star Wars Bar Scene of the wingnutosphere comfortable with taking orders from a candidate and campaign that a lot of them have considered RINO sellouts.
Interestingly enough, the main feel-good moment of the meeting appears to have been celebration of a Twitter traffic graph showing how much godless liberal butt was kicked by right-wing tweeters during the great national debate over Hilaryrosengate. That would appear to be a bad omen for those hoping this sort of idiocy does not become a regular feature of the general election campaign.
According to HuffPost’s Michael Calderone, some 60 of the chatterers at this RNC gathering were invited to a private mixer with Mitt and Ann Romney at the nearby Capitol Hill Club, lasting two hours, which is an awful lot of face time with a presumptive presidential nominee. It seems some of the discussion involved concerns that the Romney campaign was not sufficiently interested in big “stories” like the wingnutosphere belief that the ATF’s “Fast and Furious” fiasco wasn’t just a botched operation against Mexican drug lords and gun-runners, but part of a plot to confiscate all U.S. firearms. I betcha at that point Mitt was reaching in his pocket for the hand sanitizer.
In any event, sounds like everyone had a grand old time. Remember this development next time you hear some conservative shrieking about liberal new media folk conspiring with the Obama campaign to influence news coverage.
