by Steven Barboza
RNC Chairman Wants to Lead Republicans to Victory ‘By Any Means Necessary’
The chief spokesman and ideological head of the Republican Party is channeling the words and tactics of Malcolm X in an effort to defeat opponents in November, give over thirty black Republican candidates a fighting chance to upset the Democratic majority in Congress and make the GOP a truer reflection of America’s changing landscape.
Michael Steele, the first black chairman of the Republican National Committee, conjured a speech by the ‘60s radical icon to imitate a leadership style committed to unorthodox methods.
He’s not always understood — even his own mother expresses confusion over his role — but in the following interview, Steele cuts a figure as concerned with upholding the historic tenets of the GOP as forging a new reality. For African-Americans, he suggests there’s a home in the Republican Party, sense to be made of the Tea Party and a reason for entrepreneurs to be wary of the policies coming out of the White House.
What in your past would have suggested that someday you would become head of the Republican Party?
I’m still trying to find that one myself. I never set my sights on being the RNC chairman. I was politically active as a young man and, professionally, once I got a full-paying job and could actually find some time to do extra-curriculars like politics, I stayed involved, but never thought about being a national chairman.
Tell me about Petworth, the neighborhood where you grew up in Washington.
Petworth at that time was a lower middle class neighborhood. At the time my parents moved there [it was] just being integrated, so they were dealing with white flight. Remember, in those times, the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, DC was still very much a segregated city.
My dad was a handyman. He really couldn’t keep a job, largely due to his alcoholism, which eventually killed him at 36 years old. So there’s my mother and me in this brand-new house that they bought, and she’s trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage and how to raise her kid in a city that didn’t necessarily allow her to take her kid to the grocery store because she couldn’t shop there., or to the neighborhood park because it was still largely for the whites that remained in the neighborhood. But all that was changing. She raised me in an environment that adapted to that change, and taught me what that change would mean for me down the road.
In a very ironic way, that change was very much a part of the American story and the dream that Dr. King talked about, and the dream that we call the American dream. So Petworth was in a lot of ways a reflection of the childhood that I had. [It] was coming to terms with a lot of things that America took for granted and coming into its own as something new and different. That’s always kind of been in the back of my leadership style – bringing something new and different.
Tell me about your family ties to the Democratic party. Your mother was a Democrat?
Yup, still is. My stepdad John is a wonderful man, a truck driver for the Department of Defense, a Democrat. Both of them were Roosevelt Democrats. In order to help our family and supplement our income, my dad drove a limo. One of the jobs that he had at one point was having to pick up then Senator Robert F. Kennedy and take him to an event. I thought it was just sort of an ironic, sort of an interesting twist of fate.
So you were the family rebel, and still are?
Yeah, you could say that. My mom kind of looks at me that way whenever we start talking politics. I still get this look from her eyes that says, ‘Ok, tell me why you do this again?’
What from your past and upbringing do you bring to your chairmanship that wasn’t part of the office before? Would you call it street smarts? An ability to relate to the trials of urban America?
I have a certain street smarts about me. I have a political savvy that is oriented in an aggressive manner. As a young man, I was drawn and attracted to the legacy and the story of Dr. King and tried throughout my political career to emulate that side and style of his personality that reached out and looked to draw people together.
But I also relate to Malcolm X and that style and that side that says ‘by any means necessary’. I can work with the status quo up to a point. I can work with conventional wisdom up to a point. I can work with the Washington sages up to a point. But then I get to a point where [I feel] we need something different by any means necessary. We need to do something that’s going to shake us to our roots and wake us up to the new reality we are in. So my task is to work with our leadership in Washington, and around the country, to get us on the right footing. And I try to do it by any means necessary.
More than anyone else, you are the new face of the Republican Party, and yet you describe yourself as a Lincoln Republican. On the one hand, it seems like a new day for the party, on the other, you’re reminding us about a historic figure who probably could not have imagined that a black man could lead his party, let alone that one could be president. How do you reconcile these conflicting images?
Lincoln for me represents, along with Frederick Douglass, a partnership that is often under-realized, certainly overlooked by a lot of people, that really speaks to the founding of what we now call the Republican Party. Out of the roots [came] this tension between trying to find the proper solution without upsetting the apple cart too much versus taking whatever steps by whatever means necessary to reach that solution.
That healthy tension has its roots in that relationship between Lincoln and Douglass. And so that idea of President Lincoln as one of the founders of the party, to me, ties us back to those very roots. It is the birthplace of black political activism. It is the political home, if you will, for African-Americans. So as much as you want to go out and dance with Democrats, you do that all day long, but at the end of the day, you still have that place called home.
The GOP website currently has several images of African-Americans, from Denzel Washington to Frederick Douglass. Seems like an effort to revamp the Republican image, making it into a more inclusive party, one that accepts both urban conservatives and establishment Republicans. Is that so?
As I like to tell audiences all across the country – this is no longer your mama and your daddy’s Republican party. It’s now yours. It must find a way to reach you and touch you everyday so that you always know this is home.
You have been reported as saying that the Republicans have not done a very good job of giving blacks a reason for voting Republican. How have you changed that?
One, by actually running African-Americans as Republicans, whether it’s for the state legislature or for the United States Congress. By elevating their opportunity and their identity within the party. When you join a club, you join an organization. Why do you join? Well, because philosophically you’ve got something in common. Also you join because, hey, there’s some folks up in there who look like me, that come from my neighborhood maybe, that at least shop where I shop. And so that kind of image is important.
I’ve banned the word outreach at the RNC. Why? Because outreach has come to represent to me and to a lot of Republicans and African-Americans who wanted to look at the party as just a photo op, a nice cocktail party.
Many African-Americans perceive the Tea Party as hostile to the black community. What are your thoughts?
I just think that’s the wrong perception. I think that’s quite frankly been perpetrated by some in the media because they like the storyline. They like the tension, and it’s unfortunate and it’s just plain wrong. I’ve been to a number of Tea Party events and I’ve met with a number of African- American Tea Party members.
What is this movement asking for? They’re saying, we don’t want the government to take more of our money than we earn. I think black people appreciate that when they get their paycheck every two weeks. So I think that a lot of the noise around the Tea Party movement emanates from those who are not about supporting an agenda that talks about freedom, that talks about using the Constitution to safeguard those freedoms and talks about a government that needs to be put in check.
I mean, why do we always assume that when we see black people their natural equivalency is federal government or government bureaucracy? Those aren’t the folks I know. The African-Americans I know are entrepreneurs. They’re out there trying to carve out a pathway for themselves. So why not align with them and affiliate with those groups and those institutions that make that very argument on your behalf?
Are you saying Barack Obama’s tax policies hurt African-American entrepreneurs and professionals?
It strips away the one thing that you value more than anything else as an entrepreneur – control. The government has decided that it now has a better health care plan than you and your employees are going to have to be on it in some way. Otherwise you’re going to have to pay a fee or a fine or a tax. That’s a killer. And quite frankly, this is the other aspect of some of the policies that African-Americans need to be concerned about.
The president put project labor agreements back in place on federal contracts. What does that mean to a black entrepreneur? It means that you can’t compete for those contracts because you’re not unionized. Ninety percent of black-owned small businesses are non-union.
I guess the moral of the story is: when you look at politics, you cannot look at it through one lens. You cannot listen to it through one sound bite. You have to open up your eyes and your ears to what’s really going on and who is ultimately acting in your best interest.
America is changing, becoming more brown and, some would say, more liberal, openly gay and feminist. Is the Republican Party changing to adapt to this?
We better. We better recognize the unique diversity of this country, the unique opportunities that are brought by a whole host of people with different lifestyles, different cultures, different experiences, that are defining – not redefining, but defining – America in this century, just as our forefathers and mothers defined America over 230 years ago. This new generation will have their opportunity, just as immigrants who came here at the turn of the last century had their opportunity.
So as you see the browning of America, as you see the expansion of America, as you see America growing into its new self, its newer self, I want the Republican party and its principles to be very much a part of that story so that we can capture that moment and be relevant to a new generation.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
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