In the wake of Republican National Committee Chairman (for now) Michael Steele’s announcement that he will seek a second term, Republicans have started talking and telling everything they know.
On his reelection campaign website Steele says:
We fired Pelosi so let’s increase our resources and strength to take back the Senate, elect new governors, and ultimately a principled Republican leader to serve as President of the United States. United, we can make a difference for America and its future.
Like a rooster who takes credit for the sunrise, Steele claims credit for Democrats’ shellacking in the midterm elections.
The case against Steele is laid out in a National Review editorial:
His engaging manner on TV was one of his attractions as a chairman two years ago. It quickly went sour. Steele doesn’t have the discipline of a party operative. Whether it was lashing out at Rush Limbaugh or calling Afghanistan “a war of Obama’s choosing,” his gaffes distracted from the work at hand. Meanwhile, the $20,000-apiece corporate speeches, the Regnery book, and the accompanying media plugs all gave Steele, fairly or not, the whiff of the political profiteer.Likewise, his tactical choices seemed at times driven as much by personal exigencies as by party priorities. In September, with midterms kicking into high gear and every piece of data indicating that Republicans could make substantial incursions into key blue districts, where was Steele? Speechifying and fundraising in Guam — no doubt in part because the party committeemen of Guam and other U.S. territories in the Pacific and Caribbean broke heavily for Steele in 2008. A similar calculus could explain why Steele sent $20,000 from his state parties’ budget to the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, which has no voting members of Congress, zero electoral votes, and a population roughly the size of Scranton’s.
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Steele’s poor performance as chairman has had one fortunate side effect — it has created a robust field of alternatives. It gives us no pleasure to say this, but none of them would be worse than Steele, and we believe any of them would be better. Someone else deserves a chance at the top of the RNC.
Read more: Anybody but Steele
