He is the current Chairman of the National Republican Committee. He likes to believe that he was selected to lead the Republicans into the 20th century (you read that correctly) because of his popularity and his ability to reach out to all of the minorities that have been historically dissed underrepresented by the Republican Party. Now, if you know the GOP like I do, you know that this is a crock of hot gobbige. And Michael Steele is continuing in the grand old tradition of pandering to the lowest common denominator, and only getting to know your audience on as thin a surface as possible.
The Republicans were soundly defeated in their bid to continue their feifdom. John McCain and Sarah Palin ran a campaign that brought out the worst in the Republican Base (also known as "The Republican Base"), and thinly-veiled racism was kicked in the gut and bodyslammed onto the hard concrete (tm - Slick Rick) for full-fledged, Grand Dragon-style racism. Old white women were calling President Obama an Arab, young white people were calling him a terrorist and saying that he should be shot, Sarah Palin fanned the flames, and John McCain reconsidered, probably for the first time, the deal he worked out with Satan in exchange for a shot at the Presidency. But try as they might, they couldn't convince the general public that America needed 8 more years of the criminally negligent policies and arrogant attitudes that led us into the quagmire that we're in now.
Sent back to lick their wounds, the Republicans responded in the best way that they know how. They went to the Black Store and bought their own Articulate Black Man. This is the same can't-miss strategy that led to Alan Keyes running against then-Senator Obama for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. And we see how well that worked out. We all know how great the Republicans are in handling race relations. For example, Chip Saltsman, a candidate for the RNC, passed out a CD containing that unifying anthem, "Barack The Magical Negro." And it COULDN'T have been offensive, because Black neo-coon neo con Ken Blackwell said that those who were offended were just overly sensitive. So, armed with this strategy and perspective, how COULD the RNC lose?
Unfortunately, Chip didn't win. Michael Steele wound up becoming the head of the Republican Party, a move that really tickled the Republican Base. Really. You can tell that they are absolutely overjoyed at having a tool such as Steele lead them back into positions of power. Armed with this mandate from the base, Steele decides that the Republicans need to make some changes in order to not be rendered extinct by 2012 gain political momentum in the near future. And the Republicans plan on fixing themselves, and ultimately this country, by doing one of four things:
A) Evaluate the economic policies of the last 8 years, and see what worked, and discard policies that failed.
B) Discuss ways to repair the United States' image across the world, in regards to its treatment of prisoners.
C) Suggest that Bush, Cheney and Rove be brought up on war crimes for their heinous dismantling of civil liberties.
D) Look at all of the ways that Barack Obama ignited his base, from the primaries to the general election. Study these methods, and apply them to a Republican outreach program.
E) Get more conservative, and give the RNC a hip hop makeover.
For those of you who said "E", go to the head of the class and pick up your gold star.
That's right, boys and girls. The party that brought us Sarah Palin, Joe the Plumber/War Correspondent/Future Candidate? and "Drill Baby Drill" feel that the best way to reach out to the youth is to give the Republican Party a hip hop makeover. Of course, a Republican version of a Hip Hop makeover is about as bad as a Very Special Episode of Family Matters.
Steele has already begun by interjecting already-played out slang into public discourse, by saying that the Stimulus Package written by the Democrats (and championed by President Obama) is nothing but "bling bling" for people who wished to get a piece of the pie. Not to be outdone, Michele "Let's Ask The Feds To Investigate The Democrats" Bachmann joined in the act. After Steele addressed a crowd with the closest that we'll ever get to a Republican mea culpa:
"We know the past, we know we did wrong. My bad. But we go forward in appreciation of the values that brought us to this point."
...Bachmann congratulated Steele on his leadership role in the worst hip hop way possible: "Michael Steele! You be da man! You be da man..." There are just so many things wrong with this, that it'll take 3,000 pages of blogs to sort it all out. But we can start with the clumsy attempt at slang, "you be da man." That couldn't sound more racist if it were uttered by Mantan and Sleep 'N' Eat. This is about as hip hop as Vanilla Ice's "Word to your mother."
The problem with Steele trying to infuse hip hop into the RNC is that while rappers were vocal in their support of Obama, he DID NOT RUN A HIP HOP CAMPAIGN. He did not campaign as DA HIP HOP PREZ-O-DINT, and he didn't offer to have Rev. Run give the invocation at the Inauguration. True, Obama did get that dirt off his shoulders during the primaries against Hillary Clinton, but that wasn't the cornerstone of Obama's campaign or Presidency. The fact that Steele thinks that injecting a few played out "hip hop" phrases into public discourse will win minorities over to the GOP is insulting to everyone that has an ounce of common sense. There's a word for what Steele is trying to do. It's called PANDERING. It's not substantive, it's not thought-out, and it's not intelligent. The good thing is that everyone outside of the GOP's circular firing squad sees this shallow attempt at pandering for the epic fail that it is, and no one's falling for the okee-doke.
If the Republicans keep up on this path, they will be rendered irrelevant in the years to come. The Republicans will be known as the party of knuckle-dragging, fundamentalist cave-dwellars, led by a puppet put in place to give the appearance of "diversity." If this keeps up, and if Steele continues to show slum love to Gov. Jindal of Louisiana, the Republican's use of hip hop to make over the RNC will be about as effective (and cliche'd) as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
