Hatch woos Tea Party Express

Sen. Orrin Hatch announced via Twitter that he would participate in tonight's online town hall meeting organized by the Tea Party Express.

The Tea Party Express is a political action committee that supported Republican candidates such as Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell during the 2010 election cycle, and this move signals that Hatch is clearly courting the organization as he seeks its support for his 2012 reelection bid.

Interesting back-story: Hatch and Tea Party Express strategist Sal Russo are good friends. Last month, National Review Online attributed the following quotation to Russo:

"In 1976, when I was scouring the country trying to find people to stand up for Ronald Reagan, there were not very many in the Republican party that would, especially with the president being (Gerald) Ford. Orrin Hatch, however, stood up and was our state chairman. He is somebody who has been willing to stand up for a long time. … I think he was an original tea partier. He has been talking about our issues from the beginning. Orrin is a Reagan conservative, as far as I'm concerned, and that's as good as it gets."

But that's just the background for the most interesting part of the story. A few hours after linking to that National Review piece on Jan. 27, the Deseret News received an e-mail from Tea Party Express chairman Amy Kremer that quickly backpedaled away from Russo's de facto endorsement of Hatch. An unedited excerpt from Kremer's e-mail:

While Senator Orrin Hatch is certainly a very kind and decent man who is well-liked by his peers, he has also been a politician who has at times gone with the will of the entrenched political establishment instead of the will of the voters of his state. There is great excitement and energy amongst Utah tea party activists about the prospects for a constitutional conservative candidate to step forward and offer an alternative to Senator Hatch in 2012. If and when that should happen, we here at the Tea Party Express will evaluate those candidates.

Translation: Hatch's voting record will come under heavy scrutiny at tonight's online town hall meeting. (The Tea Party Express Twitter feed even said as much: "@OrrinHatch: Hope you're ready for some tough questions."

Entrenched tea partiers such as Utah's Sen. Mike Lee and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., will also engage in the proceedings. The meeting begins at 5 p.m. MST, and can be viewed at www.teapartyexpress.org

Based on something Kremer told CNN, Tom Diemer at Politics Daily reported that Hatch would be an uninvited guest at the Tea Party Express event. However, Hatch's press secretary Mark Eddington clarified for the Deseret News that Hatch is in fact an invited guest for the town hall meeting and that Kremer was misinformed at the time she spoke to CNN.

e-mail: jaskar@desnews.com Twitter: @askargo