Steele's 12-Step Plan for Self-Destruction
Former RNC chairman Jim Nicholson criticizes Michael Steele for his side activities, including book-writing.
But the real problem is not that Steele has written a book – it’s what the book says.
This site has been a long-time champion of the RNC chairman. He’s fresh, engaging, and brave. But what we most expected from him is that he’d broaden the party. His new book’s 12-step plan for Republican recovery amounts to a formula for narrowing the party into the fundraising arm of the tea party movement.
Steele opens his book with a round of internal criticism of the GOP under George W. Bush. Unusual for a party chairman – but OK. But notice what he does not criticize the party for
- No criticism for doing nothing as middle class incomes stagnated between 2000 and 2007.
- No criticism for presiding over the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
- No criticism for poor management of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
- No criticism except by gentlest indirection of the many congressional scandals since 1994.
- No criticism of the partners and enablers of Jack Abramoff, many of whom remain active in GOP leadership to this day.
Instead what we get is pure talk radio ideology – and Sarah Palin fantasy.
Consider this: if government pays your healthcare bills, it will have a vested interest in regulating your health. And the most direct approach to keeping you ‘healthy’ – as the government defines it – would be to ration your care. Unless you take care of your health as the government dictates – if you don’t lose weight or quit smoking, or exercise enough, or stop eating fast food – there could be consequences. After all, the bureaucrats will say, why should you get the very best treatment for your heart disease if you won’t take the time to lose those extra twenty pounds. That wouldn’t be fair.
The government already pays half the healthcare bills in the country through Medicare, Medicaid, and veteran’s benefits. And it seems only yesterday that Chairman Steele was pledging to fight to the knife to halt any reduction in that spending. Now it turns out that Medicare is the first step on the slippery slope to death panels for the fat.
The organizational details that a party might expect from its chairman: missing. Instead, Steele blithely cheers Arlen Specter’s defection from the GOP.
And within our party, we need to make it clear that from now on there will be a price to pay for abandoning conservative principles. The grassroots – activists from tea parties to townhalls – have sent a message: no more ‘fake-it-until-you-make-it’ conservatives. The days of merely espousing conservative principles and then, once elected, governing or legislating without principle, are over. At least one senator has already got this message – Arlen Specter.
Specter did indeed get the message. Having got the message, he walked across the hall, reaffiliated as a Democrat, and provided President Obama with the 60th vote for Obamacare. So that worked out real well! If Obamacare passes, the Democratic national committee should raise funds to erect a statue to Pat Toomey over a plaque: “The man who made it all possible.”
That’s something that a party chairman ought to be able to see. A party chairman ought to be the leader of all the Republicans, Specter as well as Toomey, Mark Kirk as well as Sarah Palin, talk radio and FrumForum.
In his day to day work, Michael Steele understands that and has acted on it. Yet his book endorses and ratifies the party-wreckers, not the party-builders. It’s a big disappointment, and not just as a reading experience.