Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele on Wednesday continued his critical talk of his successor, wondering how current RNC chair Reince Priebus can mesh the organization’s much-ballyhooed minority outreach with the GOP’s push for tougher voter registration laws widely viewed as discriminatory.
“How does Reince Priebus reconcile his approach and his agreement with voter registration policies that many in the black community view as anti-black, racist, whatever the term happens to be,” Steele said. “You’ve got to reconcile how people feel about your policies, not just the fact that you’re going to show up. You can show up any time. It’s what you say and what you do when you get there that matters most to people.”
I’m always gratified when a short-term conservative political and procedural tactic to win elections comes back and bites them in the ass, longer term, and threatens their ability to win elections. As I’ve said here before, I agree with Michael Steele. They have a problem with their position on voting.
I don’t think Republicans are actually reaching out to minority voters, so I disagree with Steele there. I think Republicans want to appear less bigoted and backward so they appeal to a larger, younger group of more tolerant white voters. But there is a real, practical and political problem with that. They’ve sold these voter ID laws so successfully the last 10 years that now the GOP base completely buy that voter fraud is a huge problem. They have an additional political problem along with their voting laws at the state level, and that’s the court cases brought by libertarians joining with conservatives. The Voting Rights Act is the most high profile case but there’s another case on the voting laws that target Latino voters.
Decisions in the Supreme Court won’t immediately become part of the discussion at the ground level, but these are important cases for voting rights advocates as a practical matter and those advocates will bring those decisions down to ground level. They’ll be doing that in the midst of the GOP minority outreach campaign.
The political and media side of the conservative movement set this voter fraud lie in motion, then they wrote it into law. I’m pleased it’s now headed back to the political side, no longer an effective rhetorical and political and procedural tactic, but a potential liability. Full circle.
Odie Hugh Manatee
It may sound strange to hear but I’m happy that the Republican party has humungous race, woman and gay problems. Otherwise conservatives from those groups might give them enough power to shove their shit right through. I would like for the Republicans to get over their problems but I do hope that they take their time about it.
Like until their party is small enough to drown in a bath tub.
Elizabelle
RE voter ID: Kevin Drum had a column recently that teens and other young people aren’t getting drivers licenses as much as before. (The slow death of the driver’s license)
Could be the economy; that cars are more expensive; that kids don’t need access to cars to interact with their friends and preferred music (they can do that electronically).
But what a way to hit people who are hurting financially; cannot afford private, convenient transportation, and you try to take away their political voice too.
Litlebritdifrnt
Here in NC at least the republicans are admitting that this bullshit has nothing to do with voter fraud.
Which of course is still bullshit but at least they are saying that Student IDs will be fine as well as expired drivers licenses or ID cards.
Ash Can
That’s entirely possible, of course, but I also think it’s possible that at least some people in the GOP leadership genuinely are trying to shill for minority votes. However, we know what will happen — their policies will get in the way, and since they’re all blind to the fact that their policies are poison, they won’t get anywhere (and will be mystified when their outreach fails miserably).
Kay
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Hah! Confidence they shattered. They told their base that elections were riddled with fraud, a lie. Now they have to pass laws to reassure their base that elections aren’t riddled with fraud.
You could not make this up. It is INSANE. It’s such a shitty way to run a state government. Smoke and mirrors and bullshit. THAT’S what chips away at confidence, not voters…voting.
schrodinger's cat
They also loss lost the new citizen vote and only one third of that population is Hispanic. So keep up the good work GOP. People who you are actively trying to disenfranchise are on to you. Now if only the clueless (or the bought) MSM would catch on.
Suffern ACE
I wonder, though, where Michael Steel was when these policies were being set up? Wasn’t he in charge of the party while they were all acorn all the time?
I’m not certain how the outreach will work, either. Remember there was a tea party diversity rally a few years back or having GOProud sponsoring CPAC. These were clearly more aimed at making young kids feel comfortable with what? Hanging out with gays who think that Iraq was the bees knees?
aimai
@Elizabelle:
Good point Elizabelle. As the population becomes more urban fewer people are finding it necessary to learn to drive as well. I grew up in a place where very few of us learned to drive at 16-I didn’t learn until I was 30 and moved to California. My 16 year old daughter and all of her friends rely entirely on public transportation at this point. None of them are in a position to earn enough money to get a car/insurance and none of their parents feel the need to help them since the kids can get around on their own. But the knock on effect of not getting that driver’s lisence may be severe given the voting rights issues.
On the other, other, hand this poses the same problem for the GOP as does their strategy with respect to women. If you deliberately attack an entire group whose votes you will need (white females, white teenager males) or disenfranchise them accidentally while trying to kneecap some other opponent then in the end you’ve just cut off your nose to spite your own face.
Kay
@Ash Can:
I think there’s this unspoken recognition that targeting groups of Americans is not just repellent to those groups, but also repellent to a larger group of voters outside those groups. Young people are an example, as is perhaps the gap they have with women.
No one can ever admit this, of course, because then they’d have to admit that this stuff is outside the mainstream, and if they admit that, then white, older males are no longer “the mainstream” against which all other things are measured.
f space that
Wait until the Supremes overturn the VRA and uphold Arizona’s stricter ID laws. Popcorn time. Obama and other Dems can just introduce a 50 state version of VRA and let the Republicans show their asses on that issue as well.
rikyrah
I’ve said it before and will continue to say it..
The GOP wants to hide behind delusions.
The delusion that Black folk in particular..
the ones who had to count the bubbles in a bar of soap..
or how many jelly beans in a jar…
or recite the Constitution from Memory…..
REMEMBER THIS.
This isn’t a story passed down from ‘generation to generation’.
It’s a story that FAMILY MEMBERS LIVED.
My own father would have been FORTY-TWO YEARS OLD if he had stayed in the state of his birth, before he would have been able to cast a vote. And, that was AFTER he put on the uniform of the United States Army and put his life on the line for a country that said he couldn’t vote.
So, no, folks don’t forget.
And while they know Jim Crow.
They can see his new revision, James Crow, Esquire from a mile away.
Folks took that voter suppression shyt PERSONAL.
PERIOD.
Todd
@Elizabelle:
Mine weren’t real quick to do it. The car culture shifted dramatically – in my area, they don’t appear to go out drag racing or doing insane speeds, and with social media, it does seem that they’re more inclined to stay home and only go out on special occasions.
I imagine that it has played hell on car gimmick manufacturers. I’m not seeing jacked up cars, aftermarket mag wheels, add-on spoilers or the stuff I used to see 20 years ago, and this is a trend that predated the 2007-2008 meltdown.
schrodinger's cat
Its their policies that are the main problem and also the celebration of the stupid. Example, Sarah Palin at CPAC and the entire hate and outrage multimedia complex.
Cassidy
I’m not feeling charitable today. These fuckers just need to lay down and die, preferably of something internal, lingering, and painful. Take Pedobear with you in a fit pain induced dementia.
Comrade Jake
Steele’s an interesting cat. Since he stepped down I’ve caught him on a few talking heads shows of late, and he actually comes across as pretty reasonable and not just another shill for the GOP. Not sure what’s going on there but it’s quite a change.
GregB
But liberals are the real racists!
-Dead Andrew Breitbart
Maude
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
And away go troubles down the drain.
MosesZD
That’s because they’re the ‘party of business.’ And they manage their party like most American CEOs.
Which is why everyone has been kicking our asses since free-trade. Without a protected market, the average US businessman just can’t compete as they’ve been taught since business school (with rare exception) that the short-run profits and a high ROI built not on efficiency, but leverage, is what matters.
Look at my pet peeve — the idiot who spent the last six years running EA into the ground. He was a Berkeley College of Business graduate (Motto: Haas School of Business – Leading Through Innovation). His innovation was to treat games (entertainment hinging on quality + relationships) like the commodities he sold (bleach & pound cake) for his prior employers.
And always on the short-run with whatever he did. Always trying to grift gamers out of a little bit more money with crap like Day 1 DLC (ME3). And constantly releasing, half-completed, bug-ridden, way-too-short for genre games that require months of patching and multiple expansions to get any semblance of long-term game play (pretty much everything).
And, of course, marketing. When you can’t build good products, you’ve got to market the crap out your shitty products to get any kinds of sales. For every dollar spent making a game, they spent half-a-dollar trying to sell that piece of crap to you… Even though marketing is only responsible for something like 15% of all game purchases and 33% is word-of-mouth (quality + relationships).
Anyway, the Republicans are dominated short-term thinkers. Just like American businesses — cook the books now, get the big bonus, get fired and exit on your golden parachute and, of course, fuck the proles…
Malovich
I like this guy.
http://www.stonekettle.com/2013/03/turd-polishing.html
NotMax
Mid-March 2013 and there’s already an Elections 2014 category?
So much for JC’s No New Categories diktat.
Oy.
MattF
Some Republicans (hey, Karl, hiya Reince) are hoping that no one remembers what ‘Jim Crow’ means… except maybe for those American Patriots of a certain pale color who had a tradition of enforcing it. But the last election sent a strong message, that American Patriots of non-pale colors remember it very clearly.
Kay
@Ash Can:
And the Tea Party people admit it. They complain that they have been portrayed or are perceived as bigots. They say that’s a killer in the current political climate and reality. They’re not talking about perceptions in minority communities. They’re talking about a much wider pool of voters.
I think the most glaring example is same sex marriage, and the mainstream GOP. They’re not going after gay people who want to get married, or even gay people. That’s a political minority. They’re worried about the larger group who are repelled by their rhetoric and actions towards that group.
If they admit that, if they admit that there IS a majority repelled by this stuff then they’re admitting they’re a minority.
Much easier to say “we want to appeal to that MINORITY GROUP over there’. That way they’re still the majority conducting outreach.
Schlemizel
The key thing to remember is a point yuo hit early on there Kay. The goopers do not really want to reach out the them lazy colored bums, they want low information white voters to no recognize that the goopers are a couple of sheet short of a klan rally. They want to increase their share of white voters not people of color. That might get them through another election cycle while they try to complete the gaming of stats like Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
They will figure out how to screw the rest of the country in the future some time later
Roger Moore
@Ash Can:
FTFY.
And where in hell was this Michael Steele when he was running the RNC? This guy actually sounds like he has some kind of clue, rather than being the incompetent token minority that the RNC gave the job to prove they’re not racist.
Maude
@rikyrah:
Dick Gregory has said that white people didn’t want black people to vote because one of them might become president.
Obama is their worst nightmare.
They’ll keep trying to squash civil rights and voting.
ETA, I got so angry when I wrote this.
MattF
@Roger Moore: I’d guess that Steele made these arguments behind the scenes, and then, as I recall, got fired.
NonyNony
@MosesZD:
Actually this is not quite true. I mean the behavior you describe is real, but it isn’t because American CEOs are incompetent and can’t compete – it’s deliberate. Our current system of taxation and financial regulation is designed to reward short-term profit-maximizing actions over long term growth and health concerns. This was done on purpose to maximize the cash flow into the pockets of the executive class at the expense of the employees and the investor class (though the investor class is so chock full of grifters willing to play hot potato that they don’t seem to recognize how much they’re getting screwed by grifting CEOs).
Basically through the 1980s and 90s (though the push started in the 70s) a deliberate choice was made to turn our economy into the perfect place for con artists to make money.
The GOP actually reflects this beautifully – they’ve decided to run their party like a big business, and since big American businesses these days are run by con artists shaving as much as they can off the top to put into their own pockets, well you can see how that might turn out for the GOP…
RSA
It seems to me that Republicans are trying to thread a very fine needle. Their views on immigration and cultural issues, combined with the southern strategy, have lost them large and growing blocs of voters who are directly affected, but it’s spilled over to parts of their own constituencies as well, such as young white voters. And being Republicans, their solution isn’t to change their ways substantively; instead they’ll keep trying to shut “undesirables” out but keep it under the radar.
Kay
@Schlemizel:
I think it’s this amazing dynamic, and you see it all over the place. It’s a bad time to bring it up, after a loss, but it’s a lot like what the NRA has managed to do. The NRA is losing “market share” and they have been every year for two decades. I didn’t know that, because they were perceived (and presented) as a majority. Nothing shows that. The polling doesn’t show that, the truth about gun sales doesn’t show that. It’s fake. They were selling more guns to fewer people.
They still retain political clout (obviously) but a lot of it is engineered and I think there’s a question whether that can continue to be propped up if they don’t have voters. So, you have to wait until reality catches up with the marketing :)
The Moar You Know
That damn Steele won’t stop telling the truth! Somebody stop him!
I love watching the GOP fester in their own shit. They’re too fucking stupid to even get up and go crap in the corner, like animals would.
Omnes Omnibus
Don’t they say that some addicts have to hit bottom before they are able to really see their problem and recover? The same may be true of the GOP.
Ken
Michael Steele: “voter registration policies that many in the black community view as anti-black, racist, whatever the term happens to be,”
May I suggest “un-American”?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Maude:
Peter Rooter, that’s the name… you just flush your troubles…
down the drain!
Kay
@Ken:
I like Steele a little bit because I saw a clip of him at one of those staged media-meet-politician events and Obama was there making fun of Steele and Steele was really laughing. Not fake Morning Joe “hah hah hah” laughing. The real thing. The two people exchanged something!
He has some joy in him. He might be an actual person with, you know, opinions and emotions.
Mr Stagger Lee
@MosesZD: Looks like in a few years to a decade the total free-market with no regulations model will kill the United States like Stalinist Marxism did to the Soviet Union.
Schlemizel
@Kay:
Exactly! The only bad part is that there is a lot of shit that has to be swallowed while we wait for that realization.
The NRA has been amazingly successful at getting morans to vote based on only one issue and then convincing them that there is only one party that is on their side in that fight. If being pro gun safety is an election loser then the NRA will hold power longer.
hugely
@Ken: +1 I like that description, in theory – though in practice voter suppression is very american as rikyrah and others have alluded to
Anyway still made me chuckle someone ought to run a commercial that finishes the sentence for him
Poopyman
@Kay: Just a reminder about Michael Steele:
The Moar You Know
@Mr Stagger Lee: Couldn’t agree more, but with this proviso: I don’t recall the Soviet Union being in debt to a lot of folks. Now, it’s true that most of our debtholders are our own citizens – oh shit, that’s even worse – but anyway, there are quite a few other nations that aren’t going to take losing a trillion or three too well when we throw up our hands and tell everyone the Cas ino has gone bankrupt.
Harold Samson
How about the reality that Gerrymandering can backfire? A 2 or 3 percent voting shift can lead to huge changes in Congress.
A Gerrymandered district has a thin margin; that’s the whole point. It’s the minority districts ( Dem, currently ) that are safe.
Mike in NC
@Malovich: I needed a cigarette after reading the CPAC takedown. But I quit 15 years ago.
Kay
@Poopyman:
Right, I remember that. But there was talk in 2006 that Republicans were running AA candidates because they knew it was going to be a wave year for Dems and so those candidates were the designated losers, ie: they wouldn’t have risked running an AA candidate, their base being what it is, in a competitive year for Republicans. They knew all those candidates were going to lose, because all Republicans faced a hostile climate in 2006, but they’d get credit for the diversity of the field.
That was the scuttlebutt here anyway among Democrats who are both more cynical and more plugged in than me. So if that was the Party calculation, I can forgive Steele for playing cynically within the game he was in. It was all optics anyway, in 2006. Maybe he knew that.
Chris
Yep.
This discrepancy explains a ton of things about politics on the right in the last fifty years. The people running the show keep finding new terrifying bogeymen to scare their base into voting for them at the polls, and then think they can simply forget about it all as soon as the election’s over. But to the base, those campaign props were real problems, and they demand to see action on them. (The “RINO!” and “liberal!” allegations thrown at Bush and McCain and other “establishment” types since 2008 are partly just them not wanting to admit that their boys fucked up, but it’s also based on that real sense of expectations not being met).
The elites could, of course, find other ways to get people to the polls other than fantasy bogeymen, in theory. But most of the alternatives would imply getting people to the polls by promising them nice things, which just defeats the purpose.
Chris
@MosesZD:
Word up on everything here.
To be fair, we live in a country where businessmen are told day in and day out by the entire culture they live in that their shit doesn’t smell like everyone else’s. I attribute a good part of the shitty functioning of our CEO class to the fact that that stuff’s just gone right to their head.
Chris
@Kay:
“They say we’re prejudiced! They say we’re biased! They say that we hate the minorities! Minorities. Understand the term, neighbors! The minorities! Shall I tell you who the minorities are? WE! WE, WE, WE, are the minorities! Because patriotism is the minority! Because love of country is the minority! Because to live in a free, white, America, seems to be of a minority opinion!”
/Twilight Zone. Sorry, had to go there.
Chris
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Blind ideology for ideology’s sake is what killed them and is killing us. It’s a bad idea in any belief system.
If the “capitalism” the West practiced in the Cold War had been the extremist, Randroid kind that we saw in the Gilded Age and became briefly popular again in the 1920s, instead of the pragmatic, reformed kind that was the legacy of the New Deal, I suspect the Cold War would’ve gone very differently. I don’t know who would’ve won, if anyone, but it sure would’ve been harder on us.
rikyrah
Here’s the thing about Michael Steele’s run for the Senate.
He got 30% of the Black vote.
I ask around conservative sites when they wanna talk to me about Black people and the GOP.
What WHITE GOP candidate…got 30% of the Black vote..
AND LOST?
So, don’t tell me that Steele lost because Black people wouldn’t vote for him..
when he got 3 times the number of Black votes that the usual GOP candidate gets.
Frankensteinbeck
You’re overthinking this. The bewilderingly self-destructive nature of their minority outreaches and the insulting tone of their rhetoric suggests they aren’t being this rational or cunning. I believe there are two motivations here. First, they hate being accused of racism, especially because they’re racists. Abusers want a paper-thin excuse to claim the moral high ground, and the GOP wants to say ‘Okay, we reached out the minorities and they were too stupid to listen.’ This is for internal satisfaction, not strategy. Second, because they’re reasoning like this they actually believe their ‘outreach’ should work. They do not understand why telling blacks they’ll gut the safety net and force them to stop being lazy
niwelfare queens and pull themselves up by their bootstraps is not taken as awesome fatherly advice.EDIT – This stuff is THE TRUTH to them. They can’t change their policies, because their policies are the whole point. They’re sure they must not have explained these things to the slow-thinking Those People loud enough.
Gretchen
@Schlemizel:
I love your “couple of sheets short of a klan rally”
Gretchen
I love how excited they are about the black neurosurgeon who spoke at their convention: “We’ve got a black guy too!” They forget that they were going “We’ve got a black guy, too” with Herman Cain, and that didn’t bring all the minorities on board. Another black guy will?
WereBear
They have this much right: they know who they are marketing to.
When the ASPCA wants money, they show you some pathetic little creature, and this works. Because it’s aimed at animal lovers and we are saps with big bleeding hearts.
When the Republicans want money, they make a screaming racist appeal that DANGER lurks at every turn from those wimmin/minority/intellectual/everything-YOU-are-not and it’s an EMERGENCY right now! They appeal to the insecure racist coward in their audience.
And it works.
Kay
@rikyrah:
That isn’t what Ohio Democrats said about his race (and others). They never said black people wouldn’t vote for him. They said white Republicans wouldn’t vote for him.
This is a whole theory. They can go on and on about it. They say the black Republican has to be appointed by the white Republican, and that’s the only way to advance in that Party. They make this (valid, I think) distinction between appointed and elected Republicans, so you can’t persuade them with a Condi Rice, for example.
schrodinger's cat
I don’t really understand what drives people like Jindal and this neurosurgeon. Are they con artists or just deluded?
WereBear
@schrodinger’s cat: They are a rare commodity in R-land. They hope to get fame and money.
So far, it’s kinda working.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Also, I think at least some of the offensiveness in their outreach to minorities is calculated to be that way.
E.G. when Romney had his “reaching out to the blacks” moment, he wasn’t really reaching out to black voters. He simply walked in and insulted them, knowing he’d provoke outrage, so that it could then be sold by Fox News and other affiliates as “reasonable white man, full of goodwill and wanting nothing but peace between our races, goes to townhall meeting with open arms and is greeted with hostility by the Savage Black Hordes. You just can’t talk to these people, you know?”
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
They’re right wing nutjobs. That’s what’s wrong with them.
I can’t understand what any nonwhite person sees in the Republican Party, but then I can’t understand what any straight white Christian male making less than $250,000 a year sees in them either.
I assume that, just as white people trade their dignity and their hopes of a good life for a chance to lord it over These People, nonwhite people like Cain, West, Jindall, D’Souza, Sowell, and all the others trade their dignity for a chance to lord it over the majority of their fellow nonwhites.
Chris
@schrodinger’s cat:
They’re right wing nutjobs. That’s what’s wrong with them.
I can’t understand what any nonwhite person sees in the Republican Party, but then I can’t understand what any straight white Christian male making less than $250,000 a year sees in them either.
I assume that, just as white people trade their dignity and their hopes of a good life for a chance to lord it over These People, nonwhite people like Cain, West, Jindall, D’Souza, Sowell, and all the others trade their dignity for a chance to lord it over the majority of their fellow nonwhites.