Republican Party Poised For New Direction
Cliff Owen/Associated Press Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, at an election night gathering hosted by the National Republican Congressional Committee.
If Republicans reject Michael Steele as chairman of their party Friday afternoon, as seems likely, it will represent a 180-degree turn from their approach just two years ago.
In January 2009, as President Obama settled into the Oval Office, Republicans chose a charismatic African-American to be a very public face of the party.
But now, two years later, the Republican National Committee seems poised to select a virtual nobody from a group of white party activists who have each pledged to burrow into just one task: raising money.
The decision will be made Friday afternoon in a series of votes by the committee’s 168 members at its winter meeting in Maryland.
Mr. Steele is fighting to stay, but party officials told my colleague Jeff Zeleny on Thursday that they saw little chance he would succeed. That is in part because of a series of gaffes by Mr. Steele and accusations about financial mismanagement under his watch that has left the committee in debt going into a presidential election cycle.
But it’s also true that the Republican Party — and Mr. Obama — are in different places than they were two years ago when Mr. Steele was chosen.
In 2009, Mr. Obama was ascendant, having taken office as the nation’s first black president after a thorough drubbing of Senator John McCain of Arizona. Mr. Obama’s approval rating was in the mid-60s in the weeks after his inauguration.
At the time, Republicans were completely out of power, having lost the House and the Senate to Democrats two years earlier. They needed someone who could reach out, especially to minorities, and broaden the party’s appeal.
“It’s time for something completely different, and we’re going to bring it to them,” Mr. Steele said at the time. “We’re going to bring this party to every corner, to every boardroom, to every neighborhood, to every community. And we’re going to say to friend and foe alike: ‘We want you to be a part of us. We want you to be with us, and for those of you who are going to obstruct, get ready to be knocked over.’ ”
But now, the relative positions of the parties are different.
Republicans have taken back the House, putting Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio into the Speaker’s office and making him a natural focus of attention as the highest-elected Republican in the land.
And within months, there will be as many as a dozen candidates officially vying for the Republican presidential nomination. By the middle of 2012, there will be a Republican nominee to officially represent the party in its battle to take back the White House from Mr. Obama.
Meanwhile, Mr. Obama is not in the same place, politically, that he was at the time of his inauguration.
He has had a few strong weeks, logging a number of political victories in the lame-duck session of Congress and receiving fairly universal support for his speech at Wednesday’s memorial service for the victims of the Arizona shootings. But his approval rating hovers around 50 percent. And the midterm elections last year proved that he and his party are politically vulnerable.
One of the lessons of those midterm elections was that money matters. Democrats were hammered by tens of millions of dollars raised by outside, independent groups who helped to defeat marginal candidates running in tough districts.
Mr. Steele’s four rivals have promised to make fund-raising their priority, recognizing the possibilities that exist if the party apparatus joins the outside groups in effectively tapping the money that is out there to win the presidency back.
They will need to. The committee is now more than $20 million in debt, and many large Republican donors have made it clear that they will not give money to the committee unless they have more confidence in the leadership.
Mr. Obama, meanwhile, is planning to raise in the neighborhood of $1 billion for his re-election campaign.
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