Forget the hype. Forget the cable and talk radio show segments and even blog posts (except the ones on this site, of course): RNC Chair Michael Steele won’t have to prepare his resume anytime soon even though he threw some GOPers’ and a powerhouse talk show host’s noses out of joint.
The Baltimore Sun’s Paul West reports that despite the brou-ha-ha that has generated a lot of new and old media coverage — controversy is what gains listenership and readership in both the new and old media and is the most enjoyable thing to write and talk about — the controversy shoot-from-the-lip RNC chair is in no immediate danger of losing his job:
But even his sharpest critics and opponents of his candidacy for chairman say the Republican National Committee isn’t likely to remove him before the end of his term, which runs through the 2010 elections.
Henry Barbour, a Republican committeeman from Mississippi, dismissed speculation that Steele’s job might be at risk as “silliness.”
Look, he’s only six weeks into this deal,” said Barbour, who supported a different candidate, Katon Dawson of South Carolina, for chairman. “He got elected to a two-year term. It’s that simple.”
Another former Dawson supporter said that nothing that has happened so far would lead members of the Republican committee to move to oust Steele.
“I think there probably are some people, possibly including Michael, who wish that the start had been a little different. But I don’t think anything has happened that would lead to as draconian a result as a vote of no confidence,” said David Norcross, a veteran RNC member from New Jersey who also served as the party’s general counsel.
“As long as I’ve been around, we’ve never held that kind of vote,” he added. “It’s really too soon to say that [Steele can’t] do the job. I think that he’s going to be fine.”
And, indeed, at a time when the GOP reportedly needs to attract new members to its party but seems to be playing to its base more than ever, could the party afford to kick out its first African-American RNC chief — someone who for all his controversial statements comes across well on TV? According to the Sun, an initial highly-publicized call for Steele’s resignation has fizzled:
An effort by a committeewoman to force Steele’s resignation has gone nowhere, according to fellow RNC members.
Besides, officials said, dumping Steele, the party’s first black chairman, would cause severe self-inflicted damage,reinforcing a notion that the party is hostile to minorities, whose support is seen as crucial to a Republican comeback.
“But that’s not what’s keeping him,” said Norcross. “What’s keeping him is a pretty general expectation that he’s going to learn the ropes and be a good chairman.”
Bill Greener, a Republican strategist and former RNC official, said Steele has acknowledged “a variety of difficulties” and is moving to put a new leadership team in place.
“While that has been happening, the rumor mill has been rife with all kinds of things,” he said. “However, as all of this plays out, it will become clear that the RNC takes seriously the idea that when they elect a chairman, it is absolutely for a two-year term.”
Republican insiders say that Steele would be more likely to resign than allow himself to be removed, if the situation became untenable. But that would require a series of events beyond what has taken place, including losing elections that Republicans thought they should have won, a sharp drop in fundraising and the failure of programs to make the party more competitive with the Democrats.
And if comments from a powerhouse such as Barbour — who, love him or hate him, is one of the GOP’s most savvy political operatives — here’s the view of another powerful GOP VIP:
Republican officials have been uniform in their public support for Steele, but usually only when they are forced to state a view.
It’s “safe to say that Michael Steele’s gotten off to kind of a rough start, but we think he’ll hit his stride soon,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the highest-ranking Republican in the nation, told reporters Friday.
Meanwhile, Democrats love to read new stories about Steele’s problems. The Swampland’s Frank James wonders if Steele isn’t the Demmies’ secret weapon — but notes that he could provide an important role for the GOP today:
For Democrats, it doesn’t get much better than Steele, a high-profile RNC chief who appears to find new ways to split his party every week.
And even better for Democrats is that it would take a two-thirds vote of the 168 members of the RNC executive committee to oust Steele, a pretty high bar.
Steele actually may yet serve a useful purpose for a national party in the political wilderness.
As he exposes the fissures in the party, between those who feel that the party shouldn’t have an anti-abortion litmus test and those who do; between those who believe that to be a majority party once again, the party needs to move to the pragmatic political center and others who believe the party must be ideologically pure, he may help the party redefine itself to the point where it offers enough voters a coherent and believable answer to the nation’s problems so that it once again gains control of Congress and the White House.
But for right now, Democrats couldn’t have orchestrated a better (or worse) start for Steele.
The bottom line is that GOP bigwigs aren’t pleased that Steele has made the focus him and his own mouthings, rather than providing the new face and new push for the GOP. But to toss him out now would not just hurt the party but be counterproductive since he hasn’t had enough time to try and put his own stamp on the party’s machinery. And they see him as having great potential.
The second bottom line is what it says about new and old media coverage.
In the mega-second news cycles of the Internet, talk radio and cable talk age, any controversy can spark any number of analysts who give their honest take on an issue ASAP or with a bit more deliberation. But in this case the reality is: journalists, talk show hosts and bloggers aren’t going to determine whether Steele goes or stays. Emotion, outrage (perpetual in the blogosphere these days), back and forth quotes, apologies — none of it may add up to reflect the actual political reality.
Yet.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.