For all the media discussion, blogging boom, and enthusiasm for Michael Steele as Republican National Chairman among RNC members, no one in the Bush White House ever offered or even suggested the party post to the former Maryland lieutenant governor and 2006 U.S. Senate nominee.

That’s what Steele himself told me this morning, as he arrived at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C.

“No, we never had any offer,” said Steele, who was the nation’s highest-elected black Republican while serving in Maryland’s second-highest office from 2002-06. “The [talk of me as a possible national chairman] was purely a grassroots movement. Right after the election [in which Steele lost a Senate race to Democrat Ben Cardin], several members of the RNC approached me and thought it would be a good idea if I became chairman. And then the bloggers got into it. It was a grassroots movement, and it even caught me by surprise.”

But, no, he emphasized, “we never had an offer” from anyone in the Bush White House.

Recalling his days as state GOP chairman of the Free State and a member of the RNC, Steele said his presence at the latest meeting of the party’s ruling body was “coming back home for me. These folks are like family.” He also expressed gratitude to his many friends on the RNC who backed his race to become the fourth black senator since Reconstruction.

Steele said that he and the President talked after his defeat in November, that Mr. Bush “expressed his confidence in me.” But Steele also made it clear that for all the rumors that he may wind up in a Bush Cabinet or some other high-level administration post, “I have not talked to anyone about a position.”

Although he lost the Senate race and holds no office, attorney-businessman Steele is being courted by several leading Republican presidential hopefuls in ’08. “I have talked to Rudy Giuliani,” he said, “and I’m going to talk to John McCain’s people this afternoon, and later to [former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney’s people. I like them all, actually, because they helped me in my campaign last year.” Like many conservatives, Steele voiced severe doubts about McCain’s campaign-finance legislation that limited the amount and shape of money in national campaigns and in the national Republican Party.

“I’m not a big fan of that,” Steele told me, “Money is property, and I think I should do with it as I wish. Look, in Virginia, for example, you can give any amount of money to a candidate for [state] office just so long as you report it. And with the Internet, you can have it online the next day. That should be the model for the nation.”

But in stating his views on campaign finance, Steele made it clear he was not ruling out backing McCain on that issue alone and felt that, when the Supreme Court revisits the constitutionality of the campaign finance legislation, the issue “may be worked out favorably. That’s why we have the system we do.”

Although it is now confirmed that Steele was never actually considered by the White House for RNC chairman, that hasn’t stopped members of the national committee from talking him up favorably as their heartthrob for party chieftain. Over dinner last night at Washington’s Equinox Restaurant, one RNC Member told me privately: “Look, I’m not going to go up against the White House on their choice for national chairman. But I could have been really enthusiastic about Michael Steele.”