michael steele
With less than two months to go before Election Day, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is focusing his energies on trying to elect Republicans in … Guam?
The embattled RNC chair has spent the last several days on a campaign tour that's distinctly unusual -- at least by the standards of how predecessors have typically kicked off the heart of campaign season in tough national campaigns. Rather than visiting key battleground states and districts to raise campaign cash, Steele has lately been stumping for GOP candidates in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Late last month, he made appearances in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. These are odd destinations, to put it mildly, for the runup to critical midterm election -- but, as CNN's Peter Hamby notes, these are all areas that helped Steele win the RNC chairmanship in '09. Steele's new island tour, Hamby surmises, could be a sign that he is trying to shore up support for another run next year.
Not surprisingly, Steele's 2010 island tour has inspired all kinds of anonymous griping among GOP officials. One RNC member told The Upshot that Steele "should be more focused on raising money and electing Republicans than on his own political future." Yet the decision to scarper off the continent makes its own kind of campaign sense, since few GOP congressional hopefuls are likely to be all that keen on photo-ops with the controversy-prone RNC chair.
Though Steele is more popular outside Washington, the GOP chairman has been under fire ever since he first took office last year. In a long series of verbal gaffes, he's suggested that he rejected orthodox GOP positions on abortion and gay marriage, was forced to walk back critical comments about conservative talk-radio star Rush Limbaugh, and implied the war in Afghanistan was not winnable while also claiming it was a conflict of President Obama's choosing. More recently, Steele was accused of trying to cover up party debts, after several months of seriously lackluster fundraising.
On Wednesday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former RNC chair who now heads the Republican Governors Association, didn't mention Steele by name but criticized the RNC's fundraising woes. "We have to come up with about $10 million that normally would have been pushed into the governor's races in various directions, largely through state parties," Barbour told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, according to Politico's Jonathan Martin.
In July, Steele defended his fundraising, telling RNC members he expected the party to raise at least $60 million by November to spend on GOP races. But that seems highly unlikely, given the fact that the RNC raised less than $5 million in July and ended the month with just over $5 million in the bank, according to its most recent Federal Election Commission filing.
Next week, Steele will be back stateside, where he plans to launch a 48-state bus tour that will take him first through the South, then onto the Midwest and West before returning back to the Northeast around Election Day. It's unclear how much of the itinerary will be devoted to fundraising, which is what many GOP officials would prefer Steele to be doing in the final seven weeks of the campaign.
(Photo of Steele: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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