"You never know when a picture with Steele will come back to haunt you"

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele tried to couple his major donors event with the SRLC meeting, but ran into problems relating to the turmoil over a strip-club visit and other charges of financial sloppiness at the RNC.

Few wealthy potential contributors to the RNC-major donors event showed up. Worse, some of his party’s best-known headliners declined his invitation to address his RNC fundraising events on Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Windsor Court Hotel, within easy walking distance of the Hilton Riverside Hotel, where the SRLC was holding its events…

At least one high-donor event Mr. Steele had scheduled for New Orleans had to be canceled for lack of interest, Republican officials said. By the time Mr. Steele took the podium as the SRLC’s windup speaker Saturday, the Hilton ballroom audience had thinned out considerably.