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PULLING FOR MICHAEL STEELE.
Michael Steel's initial tenure at head of the RNC has made for some good comedy. See this video. Or this one. Or these remixes of Michelle Bachmann exhorting Steele to "be da man!" And Andrew Golis's smart twitter observation (cadged, he says, from a colleague) that Steele is acting like "a black man imagining a white man imagining a black man," still holds. But fundamentally, I agree with Ta-Nehisi that there's something sad about the whole scene. He writes:
But I don't actually want the GOP's first major effort at ending the Southern Strategy to be a comic disaster. I've never thought that it was good thing for the country, or for black people, to have all of us on one side. This could get ugly really, really fast.
I hope it's not too meta to simply say "word."
COMMENTS (7)
The GOP played the angry white guy identity, who was soon narrowed under Bush to the angry, christian, southern white guy identity that they no other way to appeal to demographic groups besides surface imaging.
I think Steele's hip hop silliness (he never talked or acted that way when he was in Maryland politics) is the only option the GOP has.
They know they've been trapped in the Deep South and Idaho and Wyoming; they know that doesn't amount to a winning coalition anymore but to actually to appeal to new younger voters requires a programatic overhaul and clearly no one with any pull in the contemporary GOP is ready to do that. So what elese can Steele do to get attention except to act like an idiot?
Posted by: am | March 6, 2009 11:36 AM
am,
you forgot utah!
Posted by: verplanck colvin | March 6, 2009 11:49 AM
I think you and Coates are wrong. FL2K was a bridge too far in any event, but the subsequent eight years of the GOP celebrating "Let's Trash The Constitution" Bush and "Would You Like Some War Crimes With Your Corn Flakes" Cheney agitates for the Cartago Delenda Est solution.
Since laughter is the surest way to dissolve a political party, I hope for comic disaster after comic disaster until we can plow the GOP fields with salt and move on.
Non-evil conservatives deserve better.
Posted by: wcw | March 6, 2009 11:58 AM
I think the crux of the matter is that Steele does not know what his job is all about.
He seems to think he is the head of policy or public voice or something like that for the Republican party.
If he stuck to the basics (e.g. fund raising, csndidate selection, local party funding, etc) of what the RNC should be doing he would not be constantly stepping in it.
Howard Dean was virtually invicible at his tenure at DNC. And by staying out of policy and politicing he was able to be very effective at building up support from the ground up.
Posted by: esaud | March 6, 2009 12:10 PM
Bachman wasn't exhorting Steele to "be da man!" She was telling him that he _is_ "da man." Conjugation of the verb "to be" works differently in Ebonics than in standard English. If anything, it was the "you be" that was offensive, because that's the thing that especially marks it as black--white people say "you da man" all the time these days.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English#Aspect_marking
Posted by: Galen | March 6, 2009 12:47 PM
Non-evil conservatives deserve better.
True, but they won't get it if Steele is forced out of his chairmanship. He represents a step, however incompetent and half-assed, in the right direction. If the GOP's experiment with him winds up being a disaster from start to finish then conservatives will go back to their usual strategies, which would be bad for everyone except for Democratic politicians during campaign season.
* They won't get it in the GOP, at least. And if not there, where else?
Posted by: Cyrus | March 6, 2009 1:52 PM
How dare those white guys...imagine trying to look after their interests..like every other ethnic/group
Posted by: Jim | March 13, 2009 1:42 PM