President Barack Obama ignored an outreach effort by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to try and inject civility into the political process, as the new commander-in-chief faced a rising chorus of racially-tinged “birther” charges.
The 2009 episode, reported in Tim Alberta’s American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, came as the new Democratic president increasingly confronted spurious birther claims — the lie that he hadn’t been born in the United States and was ineligible to serve as commander-in-chief.
Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor and the first African American RNC chairman, refused to go birther himself. In doing so Steele rejected pleas from party colleagues who thought it would weaken the new president politically.
“I said, ‘Do you understand what it’s like for a black man to stand up and say another black man is not born here?’” Steele recalls. “People in the party wanted me to go out there and start hitting Obama on his birth certificate to score points with the base and get them all fired. I’d rather get people fired up about being right about policy and challenging the status quo that way, as opposed to playing the race card against the president.’”
Steele, in fact, tried through back channels with the White House to set up a meeting with Obama. “He wanted to get acquainted; to let Obama know that he would be civil and attempt to keep the party’s nativist voices at bay. But the president never responded.”
Steele said the lack of response disappointed him.
“Despite the public image of Barack Obama, he’s very, very partisan. He does not like Republicans. He didn’t like any of us,” Steele says. “I don’t think he really appreciated the roles that we were both in, at the same time, as black men. And in my estimation, there should have been some space for the two of us to get in a room together, just so we could say, ‘Hey, can you believe these white people?’”
Steele, once a corporate lawyer who came up through the Maryland Republican ranks as party chairman in Prince George’s County and leading the statewide GOP, served a single, two-year term atop the RNC. In January 2011, he was ousted by his one-time friend and colleague, Reince Priebus, who was the RNC’s general counsel at the same time.
Steele’s ouster came despite historic Republican victories under his chairmanship, including winning back the House majority. In doing so Republicans picked up 63 seats, erasing all Democratic gains from the prior two cycles. Republicans also won big in governor and state legislative races, putting them in prime position ahead of the next round of redistricting, to cement GOP power for years to come.
Steele today is an MSNBC political analyst.
