Exit for the Republican Obama

The first black chair of the Grand Old Party only lasted two years; despite noble perseverance to try to retain his post, Michael Steele, 52, had to withdraw from the race on Friday, after a fourth round where he received just 28 votes (out of the 168 that comprise the Republican National Committee). In the seventh round, it was a candidate with a more conventional profile who was elected as new GOP chair: Reince Priebus, a 32-year-old lawyer who headed the party in Wisconsin.

In January 2009, Michael Steele had been carried to the head of the party when the GOP was K.O., exhausted by the Bush years and prostrated by the Obama phenomenon. Quite unexpected in this still very white party, the election of Michael Steele had allowed the Republican Party to show that it, too, was capable of renewing itself … and that its fight against Barack Obama was not at all racist. Two years later, revived by the tea party wave and perked up during last November’s midterms, the GOP obviously no longer needs this foil for diversity.

Followed this fall in Virginia, in his tour to “Fire Pelosi” (the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives whom he had made into an archrival), Michael Steele convinced us that he was better than his reputation. “He surprised us,” “He is much better than we thought,” some of the activists who came to listen to him one evening near Richmond confided in us. Very much at ease, walking across the stage with his microphone, Michael Steele delivered a real cabaret number that night, alternating between jokes and attacks against the Obama administration.

But Michael Steele also often speaks a bit too quickly, risking gaffes that have tarnished his chairmanship a lot. From the beginning, in March 2009, he committed the crime of treason by declaring that (the star of talk radio) Rush Limbaugh’s tirades were “incendiary” and “ugly.” Before leading the Republicans to victory last November, he had also predicted that the party … would not be able to regain control of the House. And Steele was much criticized for his careless management of the Party’s finances. In April 2010, when it was just about a bill of nearly $2,000, submitted by one of his colleagues for an evening in a topless bar, it was thought that he could still save his job. But since then, the Republican Party’s debts have mounted to nearly $22 million, and Michael Steele was accused of “scaring off” donors. The priority of the new chair, Reince Priebus, will be to get them back. His other mission, as he himself recalled on the night of his election, is certainly to “defeat Barack Obama in 2012.”