Steele focuses on change in bid to become GOP chairman By Len Lazarick Baltimore Examiner

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The GOP needs to reach out to minorities “or we’re dead,” says Michael Steele. — Examiner file photo

12/14/08

Michael Steele, Maryland's former lieutenant governor and a candidate for U.S. Senate, talked to The Examiner about why he's running to become chairman of the Republican National Committee. Here is an edited transcript of that interview with State House Bureau Chief Len Lazarick.

Why do you want to be GOP chairman?

I have a good sense of what it's going to take to turn this ship around and get us back in the game again, if you will -- to be competitive politically, to be competitive on the issues with new ideas and a different sense of how this country should move forward.

The old battles are over. The Cold War was won, the Berlin Wall is down. We need to stop playing out of the playbook that was built around those struggles and those times and look at a new age, where energy and poverty and health care and the welfare of communities is much more at stake. The party needs to speak to those things in a very personal way.

My background and experience as a county chairman and a state chairman speaks to that. Certainly, the work that I've done to incorporate technologies and new strategies to how we communicate with voters will also lend itself to that fresh approach.

What do you intend to do as chairman?

Tear up the old playbook. There's nothing about it that works today.
We've lost two very significant, bruising battles at the national level. We're losing at the state level -- state houses and governorships are going by the boards. We need to stop the hemorrhaging.

That's going to start with building a ground game of fresh new faces and new voices that reflect a modern GOP. That's what I've tried to do at GOPAC [the candidate-training organization he chairs]. It doesn't mean that we're less conservative; it doesn't mean that those founding principles on which we have stood and are time-tested are no longer relevant. In fact, they are, maybe even more so. But how we speak to them and how we express them to voters without ticking them off or making them feel we're sitting in judgment of their lives
and communities will make the difference.

You've said that the Republican Party needs to stop saying "no" and present positive solutions. What do those positive solutions look like?

It used to be one of our strongest arguments to make to voters that how we create wealth, save wealth and spend wealth matters, and it was something that ought to be left to our own decisions and not the decisions of government.

Yet we've watched an administration move in a direction of greater intervention into the markets of this economy.

We're now setting ourselves up so that it's a knee-jerk response that government has the solution every time we hit an economic bump in the road: Let's just throw another $25 billion at it. We have opened a Pandora's box that will lead to ruin economically.

Government does not create wealth. It does not create jobs. It never has, it never will. What it can do is create pathways in which risk-takers and entrepreneurs can get on that path and do what they do best to create prosperity.

Can the Republican Party reach out to minorities?

It absolutely has to or we're dead. All you have to do is to look at the election in California, where more than 75 percent of that electorate was minority -- Hispanics, African-Americans and Asians.

If you have nothing to say to them, if you have no strategies to invite them to your party, then being just irrelevant will be a godsend.

We'd better develop a new way on health care, on the environment, on energy, on things that matter to people at their kitchen table and in their neighborhoods. Otherwise, we're opening up the door to our extinction.

With the first African-American president, wouldn't it look like pandering to have the first black chairman of the GOP?

Was it pandering for them to select Obama? Was it pandering when I was the only black lieutenant governor in the United States?

We're damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't. If we don't promote successful, smart, forward-thinking African-American or minority candidates for any position, we're lambasted and derided as racist and insensitive. When we do, then we're derided as pandering and the like.

You tell me where the happy medium is for the GOP when it comes to minority voices -- I'm tired of trying to figure out which side of the ball I need to be on. I decided I'll just play the ball as I find it on the court.

If you look at the demographic trends, not reaching out to minorities is a slow death for the party.

Exactly. Why would we make an assumption that the way to reach out to minorities is to put a black man in charge of the RNC? That's dumb if that's the only reason you're looking to do it. Clearly, there's got to be more than that coming to the table.

Is Michael Steele too nice to be the GOP chairman, as one Baltimore radio talk-show host suggested?

What the hell do you want me to do? Start smacking people upside the head?
That's the imprimatur we've already gotten as a party. Maybe it's appropriate now to actually smile as the GOP chairman -- to show that the party has some humor about itself, to show that the party can actually engage in a conversation without being cynical or critical of someone. I get enough of that from liberal Democrats. I don't need to engage in that kind of behavior.

Especially with the loss of the 1st Congressional District, the Maryland GOP is in sorry shape. Do you see a way out of this in the next election?

Sure. Absolutely. But you can't pin all your hopes on the next election. You've got to come to the table with a strategy that you think is going to work.

When I became chairman after the 1998 debacle when Ellen Sauerbrey lost [for governor] -- which came after the '94 heartbreak when the election was stolen from her -- I set up a 10-year strategy to win Senate seats and House seats and ultimately the governorship. Who knew that in two years, we'd be able to do that?

You have to have a plan and stick to that. You have to have something to say to the voters, you have something to deliver to them. You're not just sitting there going, "No, no, no. We're not Democrats."

I'm not assuming anything about 2012. What I'm assuming,
if I'm chairman, is that I'm going to work very hard each election cycle to bring the best talent, the best strategies and the best technology to convince the voters that we have something better than the other guy.

I don't need to be Democrat Lite to win.

What about the objection that you're the celebrity candidate, the media candidate?

I'm not a celebrity. Gimme a break. I'm a guy from D.C. and Prince George's County who's toiled in the bluest of the blue states.