A defiant Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said he is mending his spending but not stepping down.
“I hear our base out there, I hear the leadership,” Steele told ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “And we’re taking steps to make sure that we’re even more — how shall we say? — fiscally conservative in our spending.”
But asked whether he would resign, Steele bluntly responded, “No.”
The chairman-under-siege is trying to manage the public relations fallout from the recent disclosure of questionable spending under his leadership — just the latest in a string of embarrassments.
Steele, who is black, also said he believes he is being held to a different standard than other chairmen.
“Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. We all — a lot of folks do. I mean, it’s a different role for, you know, for me to play and others to play,” Steele said. “And that’s just the reality of it. But you take that as part of the nature of it.”
He described himself as coming on “stronger, a little bit more streetwise” and rubbing some Republicans the wrong way.
At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs called Steele’s remarks “fairly silly.”
“I think Michael Steele’s problem isn’t the race card, it’s the credit card,” Gibbs said.
A recent Federal Election Commission report on RNC expenditures included hundreds of thousands spent on private jets, luxury hotels and a $1,946 reimbursement for a night at Voyeur, a sexy Los Angeles nightclub with a lesbian and bondage theme.
Steele said he was “angry” when he learned of the nightclub expenditure, took steps to deal with the situation — then blamed his critics for blowing it out of proportion.
“I think a lot of this has really kind of taken it a lot further down the road and blowing it up larger than it needs to be,” the chairman said.
So far, no leading Republican has come forward to call for Steele to step down, and if Steele is getting behind the scenes pressure to go, he sounds like he is resisting.
But pushing out the Republican Party’s first black chairman is a tricky business, and many Republicans have so far preferred to criticize Steele’s leadership while publicly stopping short of demanding his ouster.
A recent National Journal survey of Washington Republican insiders found that 71 percent believe Steele is a liability to the party, while 20 percent judged him an asset.
But Steele has other problems in his party, as well. The key responsibility of the party chairman is raising money, and a new splinter group of former Republican officials is planning to challenge him on that front.
New American Crossroads includes former RNC Chairman Mike Duncan and former RNC co-Chairwoman Joanne Davidson. Former Chairman Ed Gillespie, along with former Bush administration political adviser Karl Rove, are also involved, among others.
