Michael Steele’s ‘honest answer’ and its consequences

It was the smartest, most astute, least ideologically-driven thing that Michael Steele’s said in a long time, and he caught hell for it almost immediately.

The “it” was his response to a question from a commentator on one of the morning TV gabfests — a response that laid his heart vis-à-vis the matter of racial equality in the United States, tolerance, patience and whether it’s possible for the storied playing field to ever be level.

Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has been under fire from many analysts and observers (including this one) for his role in contributing to the fiscally licentious management culture that led to the RNC’s West Hollywood spending scandal, and the resulting fallout. He was interviewed Monday by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

STEPHANOPOULOS: We've got a lot of questions on my blog for you this morning.

STEELE: Sure.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One came in from Myron. And he asked, "Do you feel that, as an African-American, you have a slimmer margin for error than another chairman would?"

STEELE: The honest answer is yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why is that?

STEELE: It just is. Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. We — A lot of folks do. It's a different role for, you know, for me to play and others to play. And that's just the reality of it.

The pushback was immediate, aggressive and (a departure for modern Washington) totally bipartisan. Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state and the vice RNC chairman, jumped on Steele with all fours. “To interject race here is nonsense. There is a pattern of missteps, miscues and misstatements. And as a consequence, we now can’t fall back on the issue of race.”

And White House press secretary and Quipmaster General Robert Gibbs displayed an enviable rhetorical economy on the matter, dismissing Steele’s comments in a single sentence. “Michael Steele’s problem isn’t the race card. It’s the credit card.”

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Blackwell’s response probably obscured some of the deeper issues on race that the Republicans have. What no doubt truly raised the ire of the Republicans over Steele’s comments had much to do with equating himself with Obama on this issue. That’s what got the GOP in an uproar.

“Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. … A lot of folks do.” With two brief sentences, Steele brought down part of the GOP’s carefully constructed barrier of political distinctions. By existentially aligning himself with Obama, Steele undercut his party’s effort to maintain the philosophical firewall, the us vs. them, that’s central to contemporary Republican identity. Finding common cause with “the enemy” on the nation’s enduring third-rail issue blurs the battle lines, creates the rationale for carving out a commonality the Republicans want nothing to do with. That’s one of the reasons why Blackwell hit back so hard.

And for the Obama White House, and for Democrats generally, Steele’s reply to 'Myron' was problematic because it reawakened debate over a crucial aspect of the racial divide, reanimated an intrinsically corrosive but utterly necessary narrative that the Democrats have invested much time and political capital in trying to put to rest (witness the quixotic "postracial" meme that no one who's serious about this country takes seriously).

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Steele’s honest answer, of course, is the right one. There’s always been a different threshold, a different mathematics of performance that black Americans have been subject to. The saying about “working twice as hard to get about as much” has long standing in black and minority America. It distills many of the interracial and inter-ethnic disparities in the national life, from educational achievement scores to advancement in the workplace, from unemployment statistics to life expectancies.

In a perfect world, or a less partisan one, the fact that Steele understands this would be cause for celebration. As it is, it’s another indicator of the current reflexive ruthlessness of our politics. Steele’s comments reflect a grasp of that division; ironically, the reactions to what he said don’t conceal that division so much as they reveal it for what it is.

The fact that Steele drew fire from both sides of the aisle for his honest answer to an important question indicates the common ground the Democrats and Republicans already share:

Whether it occurs within a Republican Party allergic to broadening its appeal to black and minority voters, or from inside a Democratic administration determined to take the high road on race matters by avoiding the road altogether whenever possible ... denial is an equal opportunity experience.

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Image credit: Steele top: Good Morning America/ABC News. President Obama: Still from White House video, August 2009. 

Teflon, leather and Steele

West Hollywood, Calif., is 2,307 miles from Washington, D.C., but culturally you might as well be talking about the distance between Katmandu and the moon. The forms of entertainment available in that enclave of L.A., the sweeping cultural license that’s the norm out there, don’t always go over well when you're a captive of the social mores of those living hard by the Beltway. Especially when you’re spending someone else’s money on that entertainment.

What happens in West Hollywood doesn’t necessarily stay there. Michael Steele knows that now.

By now you know (unless you’ve been off planet for the last two or three days) that Steele, the embattled but unbowed chairman of the Republican National Committee — the primary fundraising arm of the Republican Party — is under fire again, facing criticism from those in the party and outside it for his role in a debacle that could cost him his job.

On Monday morning, the Daily Caller reported that on Jan. 31, Erik Brown, a Republican who spent $1,946 on “meals” at Voyeur West Hollywood, a bondage-themed nightclub on Santa Monica Boulevard, expensed the charges to the Republican National Committee. The charges were incurred during an after-party for the RNC’s Young Eagles, a group for rising Republican stars 45 years of age and under.

Brown was reimbursed by the committee for the charges, according to Federal Election Commission filings obtained by The Daily Caller, the political news Web site launched by former conservative journalist Tucker Carlson and former Cheney op Neil Patel.

Politico reported that Voyeur is modeled after sets from Stanley Kubrick’s racy 1999 Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman movie “Eyes Wide Shut.”

An RNC spokesman released a statement Monday: “The Chairman was never at the location in question, he had no knowledge of the expenditure, nor does he find the use of committee funds at such a location at all acceptable …”

But on Tuesday, wasting no time in effecting damage control, the RNC fired Allison Meyers, the Young Eagles director, who apparently OK’d the reimbursement.

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Steele has been criticized previously for various misdeeds, all of which pale by comparison with the Voyeur matter. He published a “blueprint” book of strategies for achieving Republican election victories without telling Republican leaders about it. Then he went on a book tour to promote that “blueprint.”

He made other speaking engagements outside the purview of party business and was compensated for them. He announced an embarrassingly half-baked strategy to do a hip-hop makeover of the GOP, meant to welcome those traditionally outside the Republicans’ sphere of influence.

And now this.

Some in the D.C. wing of the punditburo — notably David Wiegel, writing in the Washington Independent and Ana Marie Cox of GQ magazine, talking to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC — have said that, despite this towering screwup on Steele’s watch, the chairman would tough it out and remain at his post. I think Wiegel and Cox couldn’t be more wrong. It’s the distinctions between Steele’s previous missteps and this one that make it highly likely, maybe even inevitable, that the chairman may not be the chairman for long.

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When the Voyeur news broke Monday, there was a little more than seven months before the 2010 midterms. If a week is a year in politics, seven months is a millennium, but the Republican leadership is faced with the urgent need to resolve a dilemma, one brought on by Steele’s apparent financial mismanagement and his equally apparent love for high style and bling.

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It’s been estimated in various media reports that Steele started his tenure in the RNC high chair with about $22 million in operating capital; that’s since reportedly evaporated to about $10 million — a burn rate of ready cash that makes the spending of startups in pre-2000 Silicon Valley look modest by comparison.

Monday night on MSNBC, Cox told Maddow that nothing would change at the RNC, and that she looked for Steele to exit his job “in November, when there’s a natural break for him to go.”

Cox’s logic seemed to be that pulling Steele from the chairmanship now would be too disruptive to the Republicans. But is the GOP really prepared to keep watching the hemorrhage of money it needs to gird for battle between now and the fall, just for the sake of maintaining the façade of party unity? Are Republicans content to stand idly by while their prestige keeps sinking without doing something about it?

Exhuming McCarthy 2.0

The Republican Party has been in an ethical wilderness for so long now, has so aggressively assisted in its own spiritual demise, it’s hard to remember when this deathwatch really began. Bereft of any vision for the nation, emotionally attuned to the punitive instinct, ready to oppose President Obama on any initiative out of reflex rather than principle, the GOP has been on intellectual and credibility life support for a long time.

Liz Cheney, Jim Bunning and the Republican National Committee just pulled the plug.

With three events that happened in such lockstep it makes you think it was intentional, the conservatives in Congress and outside have been badly served by some of their number who showed, by accident and on purpose, just how desperate and mean-spirited they’re willing to be in order to advance their agenda.

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The Republicans’ lock on their old strong suit, national security, isn’t what it used to be; two wars and responsibility for the worst attack on American soil won’t enhance its bona fides on that front over the long haul. And so, the former vice president Dick Cheney has, in speeches and op-ed pieces and a forthcoming book, been working furiously to rewrite history as it relates to the panoramically criminal actions of the Bush administration.

Daughter Liz has happily entered the family business. On March 1, Liz Cheney’s right-wing advocacy group, Keep America Safe, released a breathtakingly ridiculous Web video that suggests that lawyers at the Justice Department responsible for defending the military prisoners collectively misidentified as “detainees” share the ideological viewpoints of the al-Qaida network.



It was a revisitation of the same innuendo and character assassination perfected by Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and unleashed on the country for three harrowing years during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950's. And like her apparent ideological mentor, Liz Cheney had her Joseph Welch moment. In fact, she had more than one.

Cheney’s DoJ broadside got a lot of pushback from a broad range of conservatives, some from previous Republican administrations, who indicated that the video was off base in its ad hominem attacks of Justice attorneys. The Conservative Power Line blog called the video “vicious” and “unfounded.”

Reginald Brown, former Bush associate White House counsel said “the video is truly offensive … It’s beyond a cheap shot to suggest that a lawyer is an al-Qaida sympathizer because he advocates a detainee’s position in the Supreme Court ...”



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Cheney’s YouTube mal mot surfaced two days before a story in Politico, a piece highlighting GOP fundraising documents apparently lost or forgotten at a Republican National Committee leadership retreat for top donors and fundraisers, held Feb. 18 at the Gasparilla Inn & Club in Boca Grande, Fla.

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart, Politico reported on March 3. The 72-page document was provided to Politico by a Democrat who was apparently at the hotel.

The docs, assembled as a PowerPoint presentation, shows one graphic that highlights desired motivational triggers for getting donations from conservative supporters. At the top of the column for “Visceral Giving” (read: spot donors) is the word “Fear.” In another column headed “Calculated Giving” (code for deep-pocketed donors), motivations the document said are ripe for exploitation include giving that’s “Ego-Driven” or powered by a desire for “Access” or “Personal” reasons.

Another slide in the deck reads: “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House or the Senate? Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

From the Politico story: “In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.”

It was all too clear for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. “The Republicans simply don’t respect American voters,” he told MSNBC on Thursday. “What this shows is that they don’t even respect their own donors among their own voters.”

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As you’d expect, the damage-control machine went off loudly at RNC headquarters.

“This was an internal matter,” RNC Chairman and apologist-in-chief Michael Steele told Fox News. “Clearly it’s not something I would tolerate … We’re dealing with it administratively within the RNC.”

“They don’t get it,” Judson Phillips, an attorney and organizer of the recent National Tea Party Convention, told the Daily Beast. “They freaking don’t get it.” Phillips said he disagreed with the characterization of small donors as “reactionary” and motivated by “fear.” “Our motives are patriotic,” he said. “Can they be any more insulting?”