New RNC Leader Michael Steele Gives His Acceptance Speech

Michael Steele has become the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee.

In remarks delivered during his acceptance speech he reflected: “As a little boy growing up in this town, this is awesome.”

Steele pledged to bring the GOP back to a competitive stance against the Democrats even though most political observers view the Republican Party as in the midst of shrinking in the numbers of its party membership.

"It’s time for something completely different and we’re going to bring it to them," Mr. Steele pledged. "We’re going to bring this party to every corner, to every boardroom, to every neighborhood, to every community. And we’re going to say to friend and foe alike, ‘we want you to be a part of us, we want you to be with us and for those of you who are going to obstruct, get ready to be knocked over.’ "

The outgoing GOP chairman, Michael Duncan remarked upon Steele's victory that: “Obviously, the winds of change are blowing at the R.N.C..”

Although Mr. Steele failed to mention his racial background during his acceptance speech; many see the acsention of an African-American to head the R.N.C. as a clear counterweight to the presidential election of Barack Obama.

During the campaign that led up to the election of Mr. Steele, the Republican's managed to mangle the publics' perception of how African-Americans are viewed by the power brokers of te GOP when one of the candidates for the R,N.C. chair, Chip Saltsman the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party distributed the widely ridiculed song on a Christmas CD entitled, “Barack the Magic Negro.”

Will the Election of a Black Man to Head the RNC Return the Republican Party to Power?

In an analysis of the current state of the competition going on in the Republican National Committee between six candidates to pick a chairman, ADAM NAGOURNEY questions whether GOP leaders will choose their new party boss from a list of contenders that includes two black men; Michael Steele, whose last elected position was as Maryland lieutenant governor, or former secretary of state for Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell. With a crushing electoral defeat that caused the GOP to lose the presidency and fall further behind in the number of seats they hold in both the House and the Senate; the new RNC chairman will face a tough task to begin to reassemble a winning strategy that will stave off future electoral losses and party shrinkage. The GOP currently finds itself defined as a party of diminished power with a power base of elected officials primarily confined to a swath of Southern states. With a field that includes four other candidates; all of them white Southerners, and an electoral process determined by secret ballot; it's hard to accurately gauge any of the candidates chances. Despite claims made by party leaders, the race issue has arisen; having gained particularly ignominious attention from one of the white candidates, Tennessee state chairman, Chip Saltsman, who distributed CDs to various Republicans that contained the thinly veiled racial mockery of President-elect Obama entitled “Barack the Magic Negro.” Despite the continued existence of racial bigotry, public white support exists for Mr. Steele, which has been openly expressed by Jim Greer, and is found in the Florida Republican chairman's endorsement and statement: “Race is not a consideration of why a person should become chairman of the R.N.C., but if the nation can celebrate its first African-American president, I would certainly think the Republican Party could celebrate its first African-American chairman,.. There certainly is an advantage of a credible message of inclusion if you have a minority as chairman.” There is no hesitancy for Republicans to voice there party's challenges and current RNC chairman Mike Duncan has commented: “There were other valleys we’ve been in that were worse than this,.. I’m optimistic. I think we can come back from this. We are a center-right country. Only 20 percent of the people consider themselves liberal. That gives us a huge opportunity. We have to get our message refined. We’ll be back.” Whether Mr. Duncan is spinning the party line or truly believes in the resiliency of his party, Republicans have a lot of catching up to do in fund-raising efforts and in assembling greater technological prowess before they can confront the Democrats on more even terms. And while they try to repair the nuts and bolts of their party, they also acknowledge the clear need to grapple with creating a viable message that will attract voters. Joe Gaylord a former top aide to Newt Gingrich sums up the need for a dynamic message: “I haven’t heard a vision,.. If we do not become a future-oriented, solutions-oriented Republican Party, we are going to be in (the) wilderness for a long, long time.” Nagourney makes an astute observation on how low the GOP has sunken as a unified party: "Given the depth of the Republican Party’s difficulties — and the divisions over ideology and region being played out in the contest — party leaders said they did not think race would be a deciding factor in many, if any, votes." Republican strategist and technical adviser Phil Musser agrees that race is not the magic bullet that will return the GOP to power: "I don’t get the sense that race is a driver in the context of this election,... If it is, it’s a narrow minority. People are more interested in the plans for the committee and the ideological perspectives of the candidates running for chairman than they are about ethnicity.” The Republicans have suffered greatly on the race issue because of Obama's ability to overwhelmingly draw from the black vote and the GOP believes; according to Nagourney that: "it was unrealistic to expect the party to make serious gains among black voters, at least for now. Instead, they said, the party should seek to recover its standing, in particular among Hispanic voters, where Republicans lost ground this year." Speaking of the wedge issues that used to power the GOP to electoral victories, Florida chairman, Jim Greer acknowledged: "Those who want to obsess on those issues will continue to lose the American public, which is focusing on the economy and education and national security,... Values and principles are the foundation of our party. But if you are out of a job, or your 401(k) has halved in value, people are looking for leadership in those areas.” The Republicans at this point in time exist as a party in name only; with little political power; confronted by a desperate need for the repair of it's party machinery; suffering from visible fractures among issues; and lacking a stable and inspiring message to draw electoral majorities; hampered by a long struggle created by party divisions that block the GOP's return to power.

Removing Stones from a Long Standing Stonewall

An editorial in the New York Times opines that: "True to its mania for secrecy, the Bush administration is leaving behind vast gaps in the most sensitive White House e-mail records, and with lawyers and public interest groups in hot pursuit of information that deserves to be part of the permanent historical record. E-mail messages that have gone suspiciously missing are estimated to number in the millions. These could illuminate some of the administration’s darker moments, including the lead-up to the Iraq war, when intelligence was distorted, the destruction of videotapes of C.I.A. torture interrogations, and the vindictive outing of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson." The missing gaps in "... history also includes improper business conducted by more than 50 White House appointees via e-mail at the Republican Party headquarters." Our first line of defense against such inappropriate attempts to hoodwink the American people that everything just went poof! are the historians and archivists who requested the emails some time ago and found their efforts unanswered and then told 'geez we lost everything.' Such juvenile excuses don't cut it with tech- savvy investigators. E-mails leave plenty of electronic traces behind on the many servers they pass through that are easily traceable and are then easy to reassemble into their original context. But it seems the Bushies were didn't really play by the rules; they never intended their e-mails to be seen by the public. They used private servers that belonged to the RNC; a highly inappropriate practice that openly suggests Bush's true intent to privatize his records. As the matter has played out and provided some interesting information has surfaced through the diligent work of "(h)istorians and archivists (who) are suing the administration. We should be grateful for their efforts. Entire days of e-mail records have turned up conveniently blank at the offices of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney." It is Cheney who continues the battle against the release of the rest of the e-mails; "he is fighting to the last the transfer of his records to the National Archives, as required by law. He recently argued in court that he “alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records.” As in: L’etat c’est Dick" (The state it is Dick). Both Reagan and Clinton tried to avoid making some records public. "But the Bush team, from day one, has flouted the requirement to preserve a truthful record, ignoring repeated warnings from the National Archives. In government agencies, the public’s freedom-of-information rights have been maliciously hobbled." The National Archives also faces a significant challenge in the shear growth of electronic information since Clinton that is now associated with the Bush Administration. "It will take years to ingest before historians can truly get a handle on what is missing." Bush has covered his electronic tracks that suggest felonious intent. The Times concludes by expressing it's hope for change; that: "President-elect Barack Obama must quickly undo the damage by ordering that records be shielded from political interference, by repairing the freedom-of-information process, and by ending the abuse of the classification process to cloak the truths of the presidency."

Obama to Have Meeting With House and Senate GOP Leaders

KENNETH R. BAZINET reports in the New York Daily News that: "Barack Obama will meet face-to-face Monday for the first time as President-elect with his prime GOP foils, as battle lines form over his economic stimulus package. Obama is set to powwow at the U.S. Capitol with GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, House Republican boss John Boehner" To date, Republicans have failed to completely get behind the Obama stimulus plan. "Boehner said yesterday he was "concerned" over the price tag of the emerging proposal. And he warned Democrats against hastily ramming a measure through Congress. "Let's be clear: It is essential that this legislation be debated in a fair, open and honest way," Boehner insisted. "This is the taxpayers' money, and they deserve to know their hard-earned tax dollars aren't being wasted," he added." The Republicans clearly hope to slow down and possibly cripple the Democrats intended stimulus package. On the other hand, Democrats have hopes to have the stimulus bill ready for Obama's signature on January 20th. One of the factors that will contribute to GOP cooperation will be determined in a few days when the RNC elects a chairman and issues marching orders to the Congressional Republicans.

Republican Whiners Must Accept the Consequences of Their Many Failures

Paul Krugman comments in the New York Times that: "As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners... But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House." Its really a matter of the GOP's decision during the Nixon campaign in 1968 to develop a "Southern strategy" that gained electoral dominance by hatching a clutch of wedge issues, including the topic of "racial backlash" that set the party on a forty year course to where it happens to be today - facing the consequences of a "shrinking base." Krugman rightly points out: "If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.” Krugman calls out the Republicans; who then went on to trump their: "Contempt for expertise, (which) in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?" During their four decade run the GOP worked hard to diligently maintain a certain level of discreetness as they advocated the electoral benefits of racism. Anyone who dared to even infer that racism and republicanism formed significant chapters in the GOP's political playbook were shouted down with all the ferocity that the party and its corporate overlords could bring to bare. Even when Republicans were caught in obviously racist remarks or policies they praised their own moral superiority and never, ever admitted any wrong doing; it was that old public relations adage of deflect and deny that kept the GOP on the high moral ground. But now, as the most ideologically committed collection of conservatives attempt to assume control of the Republican National Committee, unapologetically stated, blatant racism is leading the way. It has to do with the efforts of "Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, (who) sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances... So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process... That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation." The GOP stands today as a party without ideas and dominated by a small group of southerner conservatives who have "lost the rest of the country" because they believe they were not conservative enough. They believe bailouts and public works plans to infuse the economy with capital and jobs represent a turn to socialism that cannot be tolerated. It has come to the point that the conservative-dominated RNC; as demonstrated by a recent resolution penned by conservative constitutional law attorney and national vice chairman of the RNC, James Bopp, is now issuing direct orders warning its elected officials to toe the party platform to the letter by allowing bankruptcies to occur and stand for the free market to return the economy to greater prosperity. In fact, as Krugman explains, the GOP has achieved nothing more than leading itself into a political "cul-de-sac." It is not Krugman's intention to bury the GOP as he observes: "Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy." And I can't argue with the Nobel Laureate's observations.

RNC and Congressional Republicans Differ Over Direction of Party

Ralph Z. Hallow reports in the Washington Times that: "Republican Party officials say they will try next month to pass a resolution accusing President Bush and congressional Republican leaders of embracing "socialism," underscoring deep dissension within the party at the end of Mr. Bush's administration. Those pushing the resolution, which will come before the Republican National Committee at its January meeting, say elected leaders need to be reminded of core principles. This would be the first time that the Republican National Committee established a course of action for a policy issue. In the past, the RNC left policy decisions up to elected officials. "We can't be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms," said Solomon Yue, an Oregon member and co-sponsor of a resolution that criticizes the U.S. government bailouts of the financial and auto industries. Republican National Committee Vice Chairman James Bopp Jr. wrote the resolution and asked the rest of the 168 voting members to sign it. The Bopp Resolution stands against Republican support for president-elect Obama's infrastructure public works proposal. The resolution also puts "the party on record opposing the $700 billion bailout of the financial sector, which passed Congress with Republican support and was signed by Mr. Bush, and opposing the bailout of the auto industry. The auto bailout bill was blocked by Senate Republicans, but Mr. Bush then reversed course and announced that he would use financial bailout money to aid the auto manufacturers." Some members of the RNC see the resolution as an attempt by party officials to connect the party platform directly to actions of lawmakers. RNC officials feel justified that their resolution represents the only decisive course of action that they can take, otherwise the party "will become less relevant." The question remains whether elected officials will go along with the RNC resolution. "House Minority Leader John A. Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, both of whom voted for the financial bailout but opposed the auto bailout, declined to comment. White House spokesman Tony Fratto defended the Bush administration's actions, saying, "We understand the opposition to using tax dollars to support private businesses we also oppose using tax dollars to support private businesses. But this was the necessary and responsible thing to do to prevent a collapse of the American economy." What remains uncertain is whether the RNC can enforce compliance on GOP elected officials.
... The Bopp Resolution states: "WHEREAS, the Bank Bailout Bill effectively nationalized the Nation's banking system, giving the United States non-voting warrants from participating financial institutions, and moving our free market based economy another dangerous step closer toward socialism; and WHEREAS, what was needed, and is still needed, to fix the banking industry is not a bailout, but rather a commitment to fiscal responsibility."