Chief Justice Warren Burger, accustomed to decorum and ritual, was said to have been startled by Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall one morning. One Justice after another, encountering the head of the Court, made customary greetings to “Mr. Chief Justice.” Then came Marshall with a jovial, “What’s shaking, chiefy baby.”
Michael Steele began his tenure as Republican chairman promising to attract urban young people to the GOP message. He would put together an “off the hook” campaign into “urban-suburban hip-hop settings” to appeal to minority youth, an untapped market for Republicans, to be sure.
President Obama composed a stimulus package to keep as many working people as possible from losing their jobs. Steele dismissed it, with an urbane flair, as “just a wish list from a lot of people who have been on the sidelines for years.. to get a little bling, bling.” I admit running to the urban dictionary. Did “bling bling” still mean the same thing?
Governor Bobby Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana gave a speech that went fairly flat. Steele came to the rescue. He offered “some slum love out to my buddy.” He confronted the Republican pattern of garnering white votes with race baiting campaigns. “Tonight, we tell America: we know the past, we know we did wrong. My bad.”
And so it went. Thurgood Marshall had engaged in a bit of humor, gentle disrespect combined with a little self-mocking. But Michael Steele? You didn’t have to be a hip hop enthusiast to be provoked into embarrassed eye rolling by his meat locker cool. Anyone who, as a youth, ever encountered an uncle or neighbor trying to act the part would squirm just a little.
Republicans loved it, of course. Well. Some did. At first. Michele Bachmann reflected fond visionary hopes of some that the GOP would at last achieve a sort of coolness, as she lapsed into a demented chant, introducing Steele to CPAC with “You be da man! You be da man.”
But then he started impacting the first principle, the prime directive. The Republican Party has a problem. It has accomplished a mathematical anomaly, winning huge in November, but still managing to shrink. It’s largely the tea party effect. The GOP drives out liberals, then moderates, then conservatives who are not extreme enough, then extremists who do not howl at the moon. But the party was to maintain the lead in, as they say, the key demographic. Money flows. And that’s where Steele put a dent.
The “naked lady place scandal” as Rachel Maddow adeptly called it, changed the money raising dynamic. Well publicized visits to sex bondage clubs, and subsequent argument about it, painted political donors as sexually weird and very uncool. Country Club boasts about donating to the GOP became less a status symbol than something to hide. The bottom fell out of the barrel for Republican fund raising. Conservatives still gave, but not to the Republican Party. The GOP Governor’s Association and right wing PAC’s took over. Michael Steele is more than an embarrassment. He is an active participant in the remarkable shrinking party that is now the GOP.
Last night, Steele is reported to have promised supporters in a telephone conference that he will run for re-election as head of the Republican National Committee. Here’s wishing him well in that endeavor. You be da man, Michael Steele! You be da man.