Recent election results bolster Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s prescription for derailing the Democrats. His new book, “Right Now: A 12-step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda” outlines why returning to a principled, free-market agenda will deliver a Republican majority to Congress.
But the fact that Steele has repeatedly disobeyed his own advice begs the question of whether recent gubernatorial wins in Virginia and New Jersey and the Senate victory in Massachusetts last week happened in spite of him. It should also make party elders wonder if the man in charge of the party can sway the masses when joblessness subsides.
The book drips with hypocrisy. He claims Republicans “reject identity politics” and that a “lot of bad ideas flow from categorizing people as either victims or oppressors.” But as a Senate candidate and as lieutenant governor of Maryland he championed minority business subsidies and affirmative action.
In the book Steele slams President Obama for sending his daughters to private school while rejecting school choice for poor Washington children. As lieutenant governor in Maryland he headed a commission whose final report never mentioned school vouchers, a key component of any school choice platform. The report rightly endorsed expanding charter schools, but where was his outrage for Baltimore City children denied access to safe, effective learning environments?
Author Steele promotes free-market candidates. As head of GOPAC, a national organization founded to support Republican candidates at all levels, he supported former Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, a moderate who lost in the 2008 primaries to the conservative Republican candidate and who eventually endorsed the winner, Democrat Frank Kratovil. So, in essence, Steele endorsed the Democrat by supporting Gilchrest.
Zealot Steele rejects deficit spending and new entitlements. Politician Steele caved to the Maryland State Education Association by advocating for a massive upgrade to public school teacher pensions in 2006 when he was lieutenant governor.
That legislation has added hundreds of millions each year to the contributions state taxpayers make to public school teacher retirement costs and will devour $919 million of the state budget next year, almost half of the $2 billion budget deficit facing the state.
The dichotomy between Steele’s actions and his written word, not to mention his proclivity for making outrageous statements on TV against his own party members, make him seem more like Ignatius Reilly than an inspired, rational leader.
Reilly is the delusional, self-obsessed philosopher protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” who rationalizes his way out of any personal responsibility.
Reilly seesaws between hating the wealthy and then the serfs who work for them. His incoherent worldview failed him miserably and so will Steele’s unless he aligns his beliefs with his actions.
The problem with Steele is that he will not just bring down himself if he fails, but the chance to create a positive, principled and winning alternative to what he so rightly labels the Obama administration’s “reign of error.”
Examiner Columnist Marta Mossburg is a senior fellow with the Maryland Public Policy Institute and lives in Baltimore.
