Since he was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele has been, to put it mildly, somewhat gaffe-prone. In his defense, though, at least you can say that many of his more embarrassing moments came as aprt of his attempts to make his party more welcoming -- and more appealing -- to minorities. His latest misstep, though, seems likely to set that effort back.
On Sunday, Steele was on NewsOne, a network aimed at African Americans, for a political talk show hosted by Roland Martin. During the program, Martin and Steele had this exchange:
MARTIN: But your candidates got to talk to them. One of the criticisms I've always had is Republicans -- white Republicans -- have been scared of black folks.
STEELE: You're absolutely right. I mean I've been in the room and they've been scared of me. I'm like, "I'm on your side" and so I can imagine going out there and talking to someone like you, you know, [say] "I'll listen." And they're like "Well." Let me tell you. You saw in Christie and you saw in McDonnell a door open because they went in and engaged. McDonnell was very deliberate about spending...
MARTIN: Right.
STEELE: I mean, Sheila Johnson was on his team. I mean, that was a big deal. That's because he engaged her and she helped navigate him through that relationship.
White Republicans, plenty of whom were already less than thrilled with Steele's tenure, arent' happy about what their party's chairman had to say. And you can rest assured, too, that Democrats will want to use this against the GOP, both now and down the road.
Almost immediately after Michael Steele got his job as chairman of the Republican National Committee, speculation started up about how long he’d last. So the guy’s got to be feeling pretty good today, after running the RNC through its first significant elections and, to say the least, not falling on his face.
In his press conference today, Steele was happy to talk about how yesterday’s elections ratified 10 months of GOP opposition to the president.
As recently as a couple of months ago, Republicans were written off. Many of you were writing our epitaph and reminiscing of the good old days, whatever they happen to have been. But the real heroes last night, the real heroes who brought home the victory are the Republicans and independents and, yes, even Democrats who spoke up against an incredibly arrogant government in Washington that has put our country, our freedoms and our economy at risk with unprecedented spending.
So, we know what Steele thinks: New Jersey and Virginia went for Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell, respectively, because the Obama administration is spending too much money. This is pretty much the standard GOP establishment line on the Tea Parties and Glenn Beck, rewritten to apply to yesterday’s elections. The basic idea is that the outrage of the right-wing fringe represents a broad popular reaction against the president’s policies -- if not, as Steele specifies, the president himself.
As Mike Madden wrote last night, off-year elections sometimes tell us a lot more about whose base is amped up and angry than about what the country as a whole actually thinks. But it seems pretty clear that, despite Steele, not a lot of folks voted for Christie, or even Doug Hoffman -- the third-party candidate in the race for a congressional seat in upstate New York -- as a way of endorsing House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell over President Obama. Steele may think there's just one Republican Party and he's in charge, but voters are perfectly capable of voting for their local GOP candidate without signing on for the whole hog.
Of course, it’s part of a party leader’s job to pretend that everyone’s getting along just fine. But it’s worth remembering that Steele is pretending. That’s why he brushed off the debate over what the big Democratic bright spot of the night -- the win in New York's 23rd Congressional district -- means for the GOP.
In doing so, though, he did say one thing that's contrary to the message emerging from his erstwhile allies to the right: "I don't see a victory in losing seats." That's not the way they see it, and that may cause Steele some headaches as he and his party gear up for next year's midterm elections.
There are a lot of people out there who are more than a little skeptical about the Nobel Committee's decision to award the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama. Perhaps foremost among them so far has been Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who pulled no punches in a statement the RNC released about the award:
The real question Americans are asking is, "What has President Obama actually accomplished?" It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain -- President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele may believe that he grew up on the "streets," and that such an upbringing gives him the experience to fight for his party, but his colleagues in the GOP's congressional leadership are reportedly less than thrilled with the way he's going about it.
Politico reports Monday on a meeting between Steele and several other Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner. The meeting reportedly turned into a showdown over Steele's decision to have the RNC pushing policy ideas of its own -- perhaps even without consulting people like McConnell and Boehner.
The catalyst for the debate was apparently Steele's decision to develop and push a Republican "Seniors' Health Care Bill of Rights." Politico notes, "The statement of healthcare principles, outlined in a Washington Post op-ed, began with a robust defense of Medicare that puzzled some in a party not known for its attachment to entitlements."
True enough, and it's also true that the Medicare issue eventually started tripping Steele up, as it required no small amount of cognitive dissonance for him to slam the idea of government-run healthcare even as he defended Medicare. But some credit's due to Steele for his political skills this time around. Seniors vote, and the fear that healthcare reform will lead to cuts in Medicare has been very successful in creating and mobilizing opposition to the Democrats' proposals.
Still, congressional Republicans had good reason to be upset. The RNC is, after all, not a policy shop -- it's a political outlet. And people like McConnell and Boehner are the ones who have to lead the Republicans' strategy in Congress; that task only becomes more difficult when they suddenly have to deal with policy proposals coming from the RNC. According to Politico, as of the meeting, Steele had plans to unveil more of those.
Republican National Committee Chairman isn't happy. More specifically, he isn't happy about what former President Carter said about animosity to President Obama being mainly racial. So Steele, who is himself African American, put out a pretty firey statement attacking Carter:
President Carter is flat out wrong. This isn’t about race. It is about policy.
This is a pathetic distraction by Democrats to shift attention away from the president's wildly unpopular government-run health care plan that the American people simply oppose. Injecting race into the debate over critical issues facing American families doesn’t create jobs, reform our health care system or reduce the growing deficit. It only divides Americans rather than uniting us to find solutions to challenges facing our nation.
Characterizing Americans’ disapproval of President Obama’s policies as being based on race is an outrage and a troubling sign about the lengths Democrats will go to disparage all who disagree with them. Playing the race card shows that Democrats are willing to deal from the bottom of the deck. Our political system has no place for this type of rhetoric.
As the leader of the Democratic Party President Obama should flatly reject efforts by those in his Party, including Jimmy Carter and Tim Kaine, to inject race into our civil discourse in ways that divide, not unite, Americans.
As I said Wednesday night, it was almost a foregone conclusion that Republicans would hit President Obama for bringing up the late Sen. Ted Kennedy during his address to Congress. But as I also said, South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst made it harder for the GOP to get that line of attack to stick -- Republicans are already on the defense about being crass, and so they don't have a lot of room to maneuver.
If the GOP's congressional leadership could have picked anyone to criticize Obama for his citation of Kennedy, though, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele would probably the last person on the list.
Steele came out with that criticism in an interview with the Washington Times on Thursday. He managed not to stick his foot in his mouth too badly (something of an accomplishment for him), but still, the attack floundered -- it felt forced, like even Steele wasn't convinced.
"I'm sorry, but I just felt a bit unnerved by it, in the sense he just passed," the RNC chair said of Obama's mention of Kennedy and the letter the late senator had sent the president earlier this year. "His wife was still clearly emotional. I just thought that was bad form. We all understand and appreciate the role Sen. Kennedy has played in this debate and the passion he brought to health care. I just thought that was a little bit much for me, so soon after his death, using that as a political tool."
(Hat-tip to Steve Benen.)
WASHINGTON -- Back in January, Michael Steele promised the Republican National Committee that he'd bring the GOP brand into places it hadn't been seen in a while. On Tuesday night, the world finally learned what he meant.
"What's up, Howard? How's it goin'?" Steele asked, taking the podium at Howard University -- one of the nation's oldest, and most prestigious, historically black colleges -- for a stop on what the RNC is calling his "Freedom Tour."
Howard is, indeed, not the kind of place where the GOP has been particularly popular lately. The District of Columbia, after all, gave 92 percent of its votes to President Obama last fall, and around the country, black voters were even more supportive of the Democratic ticket. The visit didn't exactly seem to stir the campus; in the student union building, the line to get into the cafeteria two floors below Steele's speech was much longer than the line to get into the talk, and the first two rows were filled in, just before the program began, by about two dozen mostly white College Republicans from other D.C. universities. Questions for what was billed as a town hall meeting had to be submitted days in advance to the Howard chapter of the college GOP.
It wasn't entirely clear that Steele was the man to turn that dynamic around -- for one thing, he only wound up taking two of those pre-screened questions, in part because he spent most of his time acting like a TV talk show host. Minutes into his talk, he fled the podium and started wandering around the room with a handheld microphone, off in search of a connection with his audience however he could find it. The RNC chairman had come to Howard with a mission -- but he may not have chosen it that wisely. For the first 40 minutes or so of his hour-long talk, Steele's message boiled down to vague platitudes about black professional role models, the need for young people to pay attention to politics and the sheer unlikelihood of his journey from D.C.'s Petworth neighborhood -- just a few miles up Georgia Avenue from Howard's campus -- to the top of the RNC. ("I grew up on 8th Street, part of the 8th Street Crew," he said, as if he was confessing to a long-ago gang affiliation. "My sister gave us that name; it was just the two of us." Cue polite laughter.)
Steele paced the room, asking students to stand up and tell him what their post-college hopes and dreams were, and trying to encourage them to reach them. (The biggest round of applause all night came when one student told Steele she hoped to be a U.S. senator from Maryland, and he said that probably meant she'd be a Democrat.) "It's important to be here, to show you that from 8th Street NW to this moment, it happens," he said. "It can happen." Which was true enough. But since nearly everyone he called on said they wanted to go to law school -- the talk was, after all, co-sponsored by Howard's Political Science Society -- the message flirted with condescension.
Things got worse when a young white woman (whom the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel identified as Amanda Duzak, a Towson University graduate student) interrupted him to say her mother had recently died of cancer because she couldn't pay for her chemotherapy. The crowd cheered -- and another RNC official there quietly gestured to a nearby campus police officer, who began walking over toward Duzak. People all around the room started shouting at Steele about how everyone in the country should have healthcare, and applauding those who were interrupting him.
But just when it seemed like Steele might have to slink out of the hall, he recovered -- by blasting Duzak for heckling him. "You can shout, and I can ignore you," he told her. "It makes for great TV. You'll probably make it tonight. Enjoy it." It was a harsh putdown, but it silenced the crowd (not to mention Duzak, who by that point was being escorted out by the police). The video is here:
"For a while, I thought his point was to, like, encourage black people, to be an all-inspiring, 'You can do this, too,'" Lindsey Smith, 19, a sophomore political science major from Durham, N.C., told me after the talk, rolling her eyes a bit. "We're already in college. There are people I left behind who need that. Most of the people who come here were coming specifically to hear about the GOP side" of politics -- not to hear a motivational talk.
For most of the night, no matter how he tried, Steele couldn't quite get the audience on his side. And he certainly did try. He constantly brought up Obama, asking the students if they would have ever thought "you would have two African Americans sitting atop the political class of this country." In Steele's mind, it seemed, being chairman of the RNC was more or less the same thing as being president. "It's not just a political game," he said of Washington's policy battles. "It's not just Barack Obama and Michael Steele going back and forth."
At one point, he started reminiscing about his garbled attempts earlier this year to talk about how he would bring GOP principles to "urban-suburban hip-hop settings." When that happened, "a lot of people just... they went to a stereotype, black and white," Steele said. "What I was saying was not talking about Republicans, all of a sudden, walking around with the whole 'bling bling,' and the pants, and -- no, that wasn't it. And it wasn't glorifying what many in the community have been pushing back on, in terms of the violence and the language and all the other aspects." As he said "bling bling," he leaned back and sort of danced, as much as a former lieutenant governor can dance. But what, exactly, did he mean? "It was about the ability to create wealth," Steele explained. "It was about the ability to create legacy wealth. You have amongst you right now a generation of African American entrepreneurs who are creating enormous wealth, and they're investing some of it in the community. They are controlling that wealth. How are they doing it? Well, instead of the publisher or the record company owning the rights to their music, they own the record company -- big difference." Steele's whole hip-hop metaphor, apparently, was based on the idea that rap MCs are rich, and therefore should be Republicans. (Don't tell Jay-Z.) Or something. The crowd, by that point, seemed to be having as tough a time following his logic as I was, and he still hadn't taken any questions.
By the time he finally did, Steele nearly lost the room altogether. Asked about healthcare policy, Steele started to dismiss the idea of a public health insurance option as part of reform proposals. One question later, Steele was done, and he rushed out of the room to meet with campus journalists -- who didn't exactly give him rave reviews. "He came in here with a staged program, he knew exactly what he was doing -- it was not an open dialog," said Kristal Hansley, 20, a junior political science major from Brooklyn. "If you want to have a debate, don't talk to us like we're kindergarteners; we understand what's going on." Apparently, though, that's just how Steele rolls.
The Case for Bicycle Commuting
RNC Ditches Employee Abortion Coverage 
Travel Through Time Via Cinema