Friday, January 30, 2009

Steele   [Andy McCarthy]

I like Michael Steele — he's one of those charismatic guys who'd be impossible not to like if you were trying not to like him.  I've only met him a couple of times, but one was in a green room where we both found ourselves with an hour to kill.  After five minutes I felt like I'd known him forever ... and after 10 minutes, I couldn't understand why he wasn't already a governor.  I've also listened to what he's said about the leadership position he once held in the moderate Republican Leadership Council, and it makes sense to me.  He's a conservative, he's usually very effective — especially on TV — and that will be refreshing.

BUT (you knew there was a "but" coming, right?), as I discuss at the end of my article today about the Republicans' craven showing on President Obama's cabinet selections, I think Steele was (is) perilously wrong on AG nominee Eric Holder — and was flat incoherent when I heard him describing his reasoning last Friday, while he was subbing for Bill Bennett on the radio.  His explanation was that Holder had the votes to be confirmed anyway and therefore opposing his nomination was futile and counter-productive.  It was better, Steele opined, to let Holder get confirmed (i.e., allow him to start wielding power) and then start confronting him on issues.

Of course, the Democrats now have the votes to push anything they want through, so by Michael's logic they should never be fought on anything until they already have it.  There seem to be many Republicans (especially in the Senate) who believe this, but I don't think Steele really does — if he did, he wouldn't be arguing against the so-called "stimulus."  Moreover, the strategic time to confront nominees on issues is before they have been confirmed — when you might actually (a) get some concessions (as Sens. Bond, Kyl and Cornyn apparently believe they have gotten from Holder on not prosecuting Bush officials) that will hem the nominee in once he's in office, and (b) start sharpening the issues you are going to confront the nominee on down the road.

My hunch is that Michael Steele knows this.  I prefer to think that what happened on Holder is that Steele foolishly got out in front before he knew all the facts — he praised the Holder choice as soon as President Obama announced it, before Steele had familiarized himself (if he ever did) with Holder's "unconscionable" (as Congress termed it) acts on the Rich pardon, the FALN pardons, the call for a "reckoning" (i.e., war crimes prosecutions against Bush officials), the description of the Supreme Court's grant of constitutional rights to alien combatants as a good "first step" on top of which we have to go "much further," and so on.  Having dug this hole for himself, Steele subtly shifted his position from strongly endorsing Holder to unpersuasively arguing that opposing Holder was a waste of time.  I'm hoping — maybe naively — that if Steele hadn't taken the first misstep he'd have gotten the later steps right, and that it's an error he won't soon make again.

If I'm wrong about that, then the GOP is in big trouble because its leadership has to start embracing these important battles, not ducking them.  There was an embarrassment of riches to exploit on Holder, Geithner and Hillary Clinton.  As I argue in the aforementioned article, fighting is how you tell people who you are, and even if you don't win it makes you stronger down the road.  There's a reason Duke and Georgetown schedule a basketball game against each other early in the season instead of padding their records by scheduling non-conference teams they can beat by 50 points:  They need to be tournament-tough when the tournament gets here. 

The GOP needs a leader who can be tournament-tough right now.  I wish Michael Steele well — he's a good guy and he certainly has the gifts to be what the party desperately needs.

01/30 05:47 PMShare