FREAK OF THE WEEK: Michael Steele

This week, the FredBlog shines the freaklight on Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican Party who can’t seem to stand up to Rush Limbaugh.

They say that politics loves a vacuum. And right now, the Republican Party in the U.S. has no political leader – after all, Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress. So that leadership role should fall to the chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), the party’s administrative and strategic arm.

Steele is the new chair of the RNC, elected by committee members back in January. He is also the RNC’s first African-American leader and was seen as a moderate who could bring the Republican Party back to big-tent status, rather than the right-wing regional party it has become.

But if Steele isn’t strong enough to stand up to radio talk-show toad Rush Limbaugh, he certainly won’t be strong enough to bring the party back to power.

And his capitulation to the Toad was the biggest political news story of this past week.

First, Steele seemed on solid footing. In response to all this talk about the Toad being the leader of the Republican Party, Steele told CNN, “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh's whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it is incendiary. Yes, it is ugly."

So good, so far.

But then the Toad burped back on his radio show, “Why do you claim to lead the Republican Party when you seem obsessed with seeing to it President Obama succeeds?”

OK Mr. Steele, ignore the Toad and remain as strong as, well, steel!

That didn’t last long.

After the Toad Show, Steele apologized, saying, “I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh. I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership. I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking. It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not."

Just try to diagram those sentences!

As if that ridiculous statement weren’t enough, Steele issued yet another apology, calling the Toad “a national conservative leader, and in no way do I want to diminish his voice. I truly apologize.”

Mr. Steele, if you can’t stand up to some radio loudmouth, how are you going to stand up to the Democrats who, by the way, control everything right now?

At least one member of the RNC is now calling on Steele to resign, citing “eroding confidence.” Got that right!

Misoverestimating Obama

As I write this, I’m watching Barack and Michelle Obama dance at another inaugural ball. But frankly, I don’t care about the pomp and circumstance of this historic inauguration day. I don’t care about what dress Michelle is wearing. And I don’t care about which marching bands took part in the parade.

What I care about is the day after, the day now-President Obama begins the hard task of fixing all that the George W. Bush administration broke over the last 8 years.

Obama told us we have to have hope, and I hope he can live up to the hype. But I also fear that people’s expectations have been set so high that he cannot possibly meet them. To turn a phrase first used by Bush, I’m afraid we may be misoverestimating Obama.

Obama talks of change – and certainly, being America’s first African-American president brings change. But there is much that will not change. For example, like Bush, he easily laces politics with religion. In fact, Obama has talked of continuing Dubya’s faith-based initiatives. He even cited scripture in his inauguration speech.

Obama talks about dealing with the wars, and many are expecting him to keep his promise of withdrawing troops from Iraq in just over a year. Is that even possible without Iraq falling apart? And I continue to be surprised at how many people don’t know that Obama pledged to INCREASE the troop presence in Afghanistan.

Much has been made of Obama being the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s “dream.” But aside from racial equality, King preached an anti-war message of peace. Increased fighting in Afghanistan will not be a fulfillment of that part of King’s dream.

In his inauguration speech, Obama talked of America’s “God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” Setting aside his statement that such a promise comes from God and not the laws of the land, if he really believes that all are equal, why does he still support inequality when it comes to marriage rights for same-sex couples? Too many gay and lesbian Americans have been too easily pacified by Obama’s glowing oratory, without really pushing Obama on this issue. Yes, Obama supports “civil unions,” and that is presidential progress, to be sure. But real change would be having a president who really means “that all are equal.” As the U.S. Supreme Court once ruled about racial segregation, “separate but equal” is not really equal. (The Los Angeles Times gets it right in its editorial, “Obama’s gay-marriage waffle,” at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-ed-warren21-2009jan21,0,1786860.story.)

The new Obama administration has a full plate – war, recession, and a damaged international reputation, just to name a few menu items. And Obama will need all the help that he can get. Right now, the best thing we can do is to stop deifying Obama, recognize that he is a vast improvement over Bush but still far from perfect, and set realistic expectations for president #44. If we don’t cool our collective jets, we will only end up even more disappointed and disillusioned than we were before.

Peach State vote is the pits

The results are in and – thanks to Georgia voters – President-elect Barack Obama will not have a filibuster-proof majority to work with in the U.S. Senate. Incumbent archconservative Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss won the Dec. 2 runoff election against Democratic challenger Jim Martin.

Chambliss won his reelection fair and square, and my beef is not with him. My question is for those voters who came out in droves on Election Day last month – to vote for Democrat Obama – and yet stayed home for the Senate runoff.

While Republican John McCain won the state of Georgia last month, he did so only by 5 percentage points – 52 to 47. And only 3 percentage points separated Chambliss and Martin in last month’s election (but neither garnered 50 percent of the vote, which was the reason for the runoff). In total, almost 4 million Georgians voted in last month’s election.

This week, however, was a different story. Only a little over 2 million Georgians voted, and Chambliss won by a whopping 14 points – 57 to 43. So what happened?

In the words of the New York Times, “Many of the Democrats who turned out last month in enthusiastic support of Barack Obama apparently did not show up at the polls on Tuesday.” The Times also quoted Merle Black of Emory University: “For a lot of African-American voters, the real election was last month. The importance of electing the first African-American president in history generated enormous enthusiasm. Everything else was anticlimactic.”

Too many voters just didn’t care issues and policies. They just voted for Obama because he’s black. If these voters cared about Obama getting legislation through the Senate, they would have turned out for Martin this week as they did for Obama.

But for these voters – many of them celebrated by the media for being first-time voters “energized” by Obama – issues and political action just don’t matter. What mattered was voting for a black man.

Not that any of this is surprising. Back when Obama won, there were too many people dancing in the streets, voicing extremely unreasonable expectations. I even heard people talking about how Obama would end the wars in both Iraq AND Afghanistan – oblivious to Obama’s comments that he wants to INCREASE the military’s presence in Afghanistan. They just weren’t paying attention to what Obama was saying, only what he looked like.

So the first opportunity these so-called energized, first-time voters had to cast a ballot after last month’s election, they sat on their hands. Without Obama on the ballot, they just didn’t care. So much for all that energy and enthusiasm.