Open Threads

Frank Rich’s Sunday column “The Great Tea Party Rip-Off” told me things I did not know about RNC Chair Michael Steele:

Steele is widely regarded as a clown by observers of all political persuasions, but he is clownish like a fox… though Steele is black, and perhaps the most enthusiastic player of the race card in American politics today, race was a red herring in his Reid vendetta. It threw most everyone off the scent of his real motivation, which had nothing to do with black versus white but everything to do with green, as in money.

A profligate spender, Steele had inaugurated his arrival as party chairman by devoting nearly $20,000 to redecorate his office because he found it “way too male” for his sensitive tastes. In the weeks just before “Game Change” emerged, Steele was in more hot water. Over the holidays, G.O.P. elders were shocked to learn that their front man had a side career as a motivational public speaker at up to $20,000 a gig. The party treasury, which contained $22.8 million upon Steele’s arrival at the end of January 2009, was down to $8.7 million by late November, with 2010 campaign expenditures rapidly arriving. “He needs to raise money for the party, not his wallet,” one Republican leader griped to Politico.

Then, just after New Year, Steele published an unexpected book of his own, “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” He hadn’t told his employers that the book was in the works, and, to add further insult, he attacks unnamed party leaders in its pages for forsaking conservative principles. Since it hit the stores, Steele has pursued a book tour for fun and personal profit, all the while daring his G.O.P. critics to bring it on. “If you don’t want me in the job, fire me,” he taunted them. “But until then, shut up. Get with the program, or get out of the way.”

Fire him? Steele knows better than anyone that his party can’t afford what Clarence Thomas might call a “high-tech lynching” of the only visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office. Steele has said that white Republicans are “scared” of him. They are. He loves to play head games with their racial paranoia and insecurities, whether he’s publicly professing “slum love” for the Indian-American Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal, or starting a blog on the R.N.C. site titled “What Up?,” or announcing that he would use “fried chicken and potato salad” to recruit minority voters. As long as the G.O.P. remains largely a whites-only country club, Steele has job security. But he had real reason to fear some new restraints on the cash box; last year the party was driven to write a rule requiring him to get approval for expenditures over $100,000.

On Jan. 9 The Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined “Frustrations With Steele Leaving G.O.P. in a Bind,” reporting, among other embarrassments, that the party had spent $90 million during Steele’s brief reign while raising just $84 million. Enter “Game Change,” right in the nick of time for Steele to pull off his own cunning game change. On Jan. 10 he stormed “Fox News Sunday” and “Meet the Press” to demand Reid’s head. There has been hardly a mention of Steele’s sins since. He can laugh all the way to the bank.

His behavior is not anomalous. Steele is representative of a fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of buckrakers who are exploiting the party’s anarchic confusion and divisions to cash in for their own private gain.

It would be nice to believe that the scam artists and kleptomaniacs-by-principle of the Republicans, having been temporarily deterred from their full-scale looting of the national Treasury and the global economy, are starting to turn their rapacious appetites upon each other…

Early Morning Open Thread: Steele ReservePost + Comments (56)