Michael Steele’s interview with GQ, posted online today, has generated buzz because of Steele’s remarks on abortion. He uses the word “choice,” which triggered alarms across the right-wing and mainstream media.
In context, Steele’s remarks on abortion may be a little looser than one expects from a Republican Party chairman, but they are in line with pro-life sentiment as viewed through the prism of legal fact (it is a fact that women have a right to choose to have an abortion or not) and his own birth mother’s choice to put him up for adoption.
Steele has sought to clarify the remarks and tamp down any controversy.
The whole interview is actually worth a read because it’s illuminating and entertaining. Not one to mince words, Steele discusses his personal life, including his first moments with his adopted mother, his decision to enter – and then leave – seminary, and his taste in music and fashion.
He also raps political – talking about the fantasyland of bipartisanship, hot-button issues like (as noted) abortion and gay marriage, and Republican failure to comfortably incorporate outreach to African Americans in their broader message.
What surprised me more than his comments on abortion is the extent to which Steele expresses himself as a black man first and a party leader second. The tendency among black people in the Republican Party is to emphasize the GOP as the party of individual opportunity and downplay issues with racial overtones.
Steele, on the other hand, is clearly agitated about issues like racial profiling, affirmative action, and discrimination in housing, business, and education.
If there’s anything troubling in the interview it’s that Steele comes close to re-raising the question of whether Barack Obama is a Muslim – the way Hillary Clinton did in the campaign, by sort of half-assedly saying, “Well, he says he’s not, so I believe him.”
Steele suggests that the Muslim questions were a manifestation of the public’s lack of information about who Obama really is. That may be true, but it’s too shady an answer. Hearing it from a national party leader gives cover to people with uglier impulses.
Kudos to Steele for giving a nice, coherent summary of why the Republican Party is relevant in today’s politics:
We are the conservative party of this country. We are a party that values life, born and unborn. We value hard work, individual rights, and liberties. We value the individual – to go out and carve out a dream for themselves. We value free-market and free-enterprise solutions. We value smaller government. We think the less government in your life, the better off you are as an individual and a family.
And Steele seems to be one of the few Republicans who isn’t conveniently allergic to George W. Bush:
[W]hile everyone could scream and jump up and down about the war, you can’t take away from the guy a number of things. One, he didn’t waver in his determination to keep America safe, which has resulted in eight years now without terrorist activity on our soil. He put in place the mechanisms that I think will serve the Obama administration very well, and in fact, as we see, the Obama administration is adopting a lot of Bush policies on the war and the approach for homeland security – including bringing on his secretary of defense. So when people talk about – you know, during the campaign – that John McCain would be a third Bush term? Welcome to the third Bush term, when it comes to national security and foreign affairs.
Finally, Steele sums up the historical awesomeness of the current leadership scene in national politics:
I mean, who’da thunk it in 1963 that in 2009 two black men would sit on top of the political world of this country? How friggin’ awesome is that?
