If the chairman of the Democratic National Committee had
suggested that Republicans were being unfairly critical of their
national chairman because he is black, Republican Party officials
would swiftly demand an apology. Some surely would call for his
resignation. But when their own chairman suggests precisely that,
he is met with silence.
Asked by George Stephanopoulos on Monday if he felt he was
held to a higher standard because he is black, Steele
infamously responded,
“The honest answer is, ‘yes.’ Barack Obama has a slimmer margin.
A lot of folks do. It’s a different role for me to play and
others to play and that’s just the reality of it. But you take
that as part of the nature of it.”
The nature of what, exactly, he never explained. Racism?
Racism by whom? The people criticizing Michael Steele are his
fellow Republicans. They are the only people he could possibly
mean when he said he and President Obama were both held to a
higher standard because they are black. Those darned Republicans
and their refusal to treat black men as white men’s
equals.
It was a Republican president, George W. Bush, who strove
to eradicate the “soft bigotry of low expectations” from
America’s public schools. Now the Republican National Committee
chairman says the soft bigotry of low expectations is applied to
him. And the president. By Republicans.
Perhaps, as a University of Illinois sociologist
told
Newsweek, Steele’s comment isn’t really idiotic,
it only makes him “look like an idiot, because it’s so hard to
explain what you mean.”
Or perhaps he means exactly what he very clearly implied.
If only there were a pattern of behavior, a series of public
statements we could examine to see if he has a habit of
attempting to silence his critics by playing the race
card.
Oh, lookee here.
It seems that in February, again surrounded by criticism of
his public performance as party chairman,
Steele told Washingtonian
magazine, “I don’t see stories about the internal operations of
the DNC that I see about this operation. Why? Is it because
Michael Steele is the chairman, or is it because a black man is
chairman?”
His attempt to clarify those remarks was incomprehensible.
“It’s not because of my race, but race is more of a factor than
it ordinarily would be — just as it is for Barack Obama.”
He, unfortunately, went on: “The general mindset when you
see, hear or read about an African American, you think,
politically, Democrat. And all of a sudden, you’ve got this
brother who’s a Republican and you go, ‘OK now, what does that
look like and how does it manifest itself?’ That’s it. More
curiosity than anything else. It’s just one of the things you’ve
got to live with.”
So he gets more criticism than Tim Kaine because people are
not accustomed to seeing a black Republican, and that surprise
manifests itself as an expression of curiosity, which is just
something he’s got to live with.
Science could study that statement for a century and its
meaning would remain shrouded in mystery.
Then there was the GQ
interview of March, 2009, in which
Steele repeatedly said black kids don’t have quality textbooks
because of white racism and said “folks see me walk in a room,
they don’t see the chairman of the Republican Party, they see a
black man just walked into the room.”
Then he dropped this little bomb. Asked if he would be the
RNC chairman were he white, he gave a long pause and replied,
“The answer to that is I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s a very
good question. And it says a lot about, I think, where the party
is right now that I can’t answer it.”
Three times the chairman of the Republican National
Committee suggested that his own party harbors deeply felt racial
prejudice. Three times is a pattern.
In each of those interviews, Steele compared himself to
Barack Obama. There are voluminous differences between Michael
Steele and Barack Obama One of them is that Barack Obama never
talks about his race. He buried that issue with his famous race
speech in Philadelphia.
Michael Steele has received an infinitesimal fraction of
the criticism leveled at Barack Obama since each of them took
office in January of 2009. And yet only Steele has attempted to
blame his bad press on the racism of his critics.
Steele’s comment this week was so awful that it not only
made him look bad, but it managed to make White House Press
Secretary Robert Gibbs look good. Asked about Steele’s words,
Gibbs delivered the best line of his tenure: “I think Michael
Steele’s problem isn’t the race card, it’s the credit
card.”
When Robert Gibbs destroys a line of argument you’ve built
up throughout multiple interviews conducted over the course of
more than a year by delivering a pithy one-liner, your
credibility has been nullified. It’s time to stop making that
argument.
