Steele Through The Mill

Posted 11/10/2005

Politics: Maryland Democrats continue their attacks on Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, preferring to judge him not on the content of his character, but on the color of his skin. But that's OK. He's a Republican.

Steele knows politics ain't beanbag, especially if you're a black conservative Republican in a party long accused of racial insensitivity. During his 2002 campaign, The Baltimore Sun echoed the prevailing sentiment among the so-called mainstream media toward black Republicans when it opined that Steele brought little to the race "but the color of his skin."

Also during that campaign — in which Steele, in one of the bluest of blue states, became the first black and first Republican lieutenant governor in Maryland history — the white president of the Maryland Senate, Thomas Miller, called Steele an "Uncle Tom," a remark he later apologized for.

At a debate at the historically black college Morgan State, liberal Democrats who, as columnist Ann Coulter can attest, love to toss pies and other goodies at Republican speakers, pelted Steele with a symbolic epithet — Oreo cookies.

Such tactics are fine with black Maryland Democrats such as Delegate Salima Siler Marriott. Steele, she has said, invites comparison to a slave who loves his cruel master or to that famous cookie that is black on the outside but white on the inside. In her view, his conservative political philosophy is anti-black.

"Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community," Marriott said. "His policies are not in the best interests of black people."

But Steele is running to represent all the people of Maryland in the U.S. Senate, not just its black citizens. Just which party represents the "best interests of black people" is open to question. At the 2004 GOP National Convention, Steele noted the progress made toward achieving Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. "We have come even further," he added, "since a majority of Republicans in the United States Senate fought off the segregationist Democrats to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

Steele has a good chance of becoming one of those Senate Republicans and has state and national Democrats worried. He not only shatters the stereotype of the GOP as the party of David Duke and Strom Thurmond. He also threatens to continue GOP inroads in one of the main constituencies of the liberal Democratic base.

So desperate are they to stop him that Chuck Schumer's Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee illegally obtained a copy of his credit report, a matter currently under investigation by the FBI.

Few Maryland Democrats, including the two leading candidates for governor, Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan and Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, have repudiated the attacks based on Steele's race.

Then there's Joe Trippi, spokesman for Steele's possible opponent in the general election, former Congressman and NAACP official Kweisi Mfume. Trippi, a wheel in Howard Dean's presidential drive last year, said those pelting Steele with Oreo cookies and calling him "Uncle Tom" are simply "pointing out the obvious."

To his credit, Mfume himself has distanced himself from such statements, saying: "Black bigotry can be just as cruel as white bigotry. There are too many bigots in too many places."
Indeed. These attacks are nothing new for Steele or other black Republicans, something we think he shall overcome this time as well.