Among those extremely disappointed in Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele is author, columnist, and broadcaster Armstrong Williams, pictured at right.Check out his latest column in yesterday's Washington Times. It's a very good one.
It's one thing for a politician to have the popular touch, but it's quite another for a leader who takes seriously the task of rebuilding a downtrodden party to go about preening before the paparazzi like a B-list actor on the comeback trail.
There's no doubt newly minted Republican Party Chairman Michael S. Steele is a man who likes to be liked. So much so, in fact, that he insists on being everything to everyone. Sadly, he may end up being nothing to anyone.
The media spotlight he so desperately seeks becomes absolutely useless the minute he forgets his own lines ... and starts reading from the Democratic Party's script, such as recently when he crossed the lines in a GQ article by callously referring to the horror of abortion as "an individual choice."...
Believing himself a man of tempered mettle, he may think he can say just about anything and wriggle out of it if the audience turns against him. And it's true that for far too long Mr. Steele has been allowed to just wing it. It's as if he believes all he has to do is just talk loud and long enough and eventually he'll end up saying the right thing. But in the world of the endless sound bite, one's words can easily be quoted out of context. The odd slip of the tongue ends up being replayed over and over again. We all know Mr. Steele is articulate, but we're beginning to figure out that he can also be quite verbose.
And that verbosity has resulted in a series of gaffes that have damaged Mr. Steele's credibility, primarily because he's always going around apologizing for one thing or another. After a while, however, you run out of excuses for the missed shots and flagrant fouls. At some point your teammates will just stop passing you the ball...
"You didn't have to go much further than the Republican National Convention," CNN host D.L. Hughley argued, "it literally looked like Nazi Germany."
"You're right," responded Mr. Steele, who was then rudely interrupted by fellow guest Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy.
If Mr. Steele really believes that the Republican Convention looked like Nazi Germany, why did he even bother to show up? Could it be true that he believes he's now the "de facto" leader of the Nazi party?
No one is seriously suggesting that Mr. Steele believes anything of the sort, but his overly accommodating stance in the face of confrontation has undoubtedly led to some rather compromising situations.
All of this leads to the obvious question: Mr. Steele, who are you, really?...
