T-Paw: Tea partiers are great, cannot be 'harnessed'

Despite the very late-running schedule at CPAC today, I had the opportunity to drop in on a happy hour this evening for Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who had spoken at the event in the morning. He was asked by another reporter about the tea party movement and why there weren’t more Tea Partiers at CPAC, and he surmised that probably there were a lot of them.

“I think the tea party movement is great,” Pawlenty said. He rejected the idea that they were some kind of marginal force at the edges of the conservative movement. “There was a time when the Reagan people were the outsiders,” he said.