House of Eratosthenes

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele faces an all-but-impossible path to reelection this month, as a majority of the RNC’s 168 members indicate that they will not support the controversial chairman for another term.

A weeklong canvass of the party’s governing board by POLITICO revealed 88 members who have decided not to vote for Steele, either opting to support one of his opponents or simply ruling out Steele as a choice in the race.

Fifty-five members, some of whom have endorsed one of Steele’s challengers, have signaled that they will not support the chairman under any circumstances. An additional 33 pledged their support elsewhere.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer fella.

Steele represents a brand of leadership, which is bipartisan in nature — I saw Janet Napolitano, somewhere, doing the same thing — which could be accurately albeit clumsilly described as “since the status quo is something I like and you don’t, let’s treat it as an inevitability and stop discussing anything.” Or, as they used to say in my last job, if you just unclench back there it’ll go in a lot easier.

I’ve often suspected Steele is in no position to be taking such a stand. Seeing some solid evidence of this is reassuring.

His message is woefully out of step with what’s going on. A Republican party stepping forward in 2012, to tell America “This is just the way things are going, and you need to get used to it” isn’t gonna win. It would scare the bejeezus, quite rightfully, out of the moderates who’ve had about all they can stand of Obama and His shenanigans, but still live in quaking terror of a new Christian theocracy in a fashionable 1980’s kinda way.

And ideology aside, it doesn’t fit the spirit of the country. We’re having something of a resurgence of the Spirit of 1776 right now…a rather pale, wispy imitation of what came before, no doubt, but it’s still there. We’re not in the mood to shut up and do what our “leaders” say just because they’re where they are and it’s too much trouble to dislodge them. Well, most of us aren’t. And it has not escaped my notice that most, or all, of Steele’s defensive rhetoric has taken on this form: I am where I am, getting rid of me is more trouble than it’s worth, that couch you’re sitting on is comfy, shut up, let me do my thing, there are some great re-runs coming on.

If Steele’s identity is to be festooned to such a message…and I think that is a decision that has been lifted from his hands, by now…and he somehow manages to stay put, he’ll be even more out-of-place as the 2012 campaign takes off, than he is right now.

The Republican party that prevails next year, is a Republican party that’s about putting the people back in charge of things. (Hey, that’s exactly what the hippies used to say…funny, innit?) Steele is an establishment elitist snot down to the very core. He doesn’t fit and he needs to go.

Steele represents most of what’s wrong with the GOP in particular, and the political class in general.

Something like Conquest’s 2nd Law of Politics applies in some form right down the line in Washington. Just as all organizations that aren’t explicitly rightwing eventually become leftwing, so too does everyone in the political class become a jobber. Steele is merely more open about his hackery than most — what else does “I’m too much trouble to fire?” represent?
- Severian | 01/03/2011 @ 13:05
Hope it doesn’t make me a racist for saying so…but Steele’s not-a-Trojan-horse-liberal in the same way that The Anointed One is not-a-socialist.

As one flails around trying to think of ways the subject might qualify for the description, in which the subject has not already done so……..one is left with next to nuthin’. In Steele’s case, he could throw “trouble is, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer” into his next speech, and he might very well be on his way to doing exactly that.
- mkfreeberg | 01/03/2011 @ 13:19
Oh, you’re a racist, all right. But aren’t we all these days?

And that right there is the problem with Michael Steele. The “logic,” such as it is, of Steele as RNC chair seems to be the same as parachuting Alan Keyes into that Illinois congressional race -“look, America! We’re down with brown people!”

Ummm….yeah. How’d that work out again?

The GOP really needs to leave that identity politics shit to the Democrats. They’re far better at it than Republicans could ever hope to be. I look at it like this: if your first identification is anything other than “American,” that’s a problem. I’m tired of hearing all this business about Latinos being “naturally conservative” or the endless statistics on how Democrat, not Republican, programs hurt poor and minorities more. This has been obvious for decades. But guess what? They’re still gonna vote for the other guys, and the other guys are still gonna call us racists no matter how many tokens we line up to give keynoters.

You can either have principles, or you can have endlessly changing, micro-calibrated scales of victimological virtue. If you want the former, come with us. It’s a big tent; all you need to do is be more attached to America than whatever race/class/gender/sexuality the left keeps trying to assign you. If you want the latter, go with them. The faster the GOP embraces this, the faster we’ll have real reform.
- Severian | 01/03/2011 @ 14:48
Clarification: (since I wrote this while doing two or three other things). I don’t want anyone to give up his/her race, class, or gender identity. It’s just that principles transcend these things — free markets are good for white and black, gay and straight. There’s no “gay freedom” or “African-American rule of law;” it’s just “freedom” and “the rule of law.”

I wonder if, given their attachment to identity politics, white liberals actually think of themselves as “Caucasian-Americans”? That’d explain a lot about liberal guilt, wouldn’t it? Since whites are a majority in this country, and clearly “overrepresented” in high-end professions, if you start thinking about “Caucasian-Americans” as one of the growing groups of hyphenated Americans it might make a twisted kind of sense to pass so many self-flagellating policies…
- Severian | 01/03/2011 @ 14:53

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Majority of RNC Against SteeleMonday, January 3rd, 2011

Majority of RNC Against Steele
Monday, January 3rd, 2011