A horse of a different color: Maryland's Michael Steele and the courage of the black Republican

National Review, Dec 5, 2005 by Jay Nordlinger

As a black Republican, Michael Steele is used to taunts and attacks. Over the years, he has developed skin that is not only black but thick as well. "I'm not an elephant for nothing," he notes. Steele, the lieutenant governor of Maryland, will need that elephant's skin for the campaign he has just launched. He's running for the U.S. Senate, hoping to succeed Democrat Paul Sarbanes, who is retiring after five terms.

On the day he announced his Senate candidacy, all hell broke loose. Steve Gilliard is a popular blogger in New York, running a left-wing site called The News Blog. He ran a doctored photo of Steele, depicting him as a hideous minstrel. The caption underneath said, "I's Simple Sambo and I's running for the Big House." Nice, huh? But hardly novel for Mike Steele. When he ran for lieutenant governor in 2002, he was pelted with Oreo cookies. (Get it? Black on the outside, white on the inside.) The president of the state senate, Thomas V. "Mike" Miller--white, as it happens--called him "the personification of an Uncle Tom." (He later apologized.) The Baltimore Sun, in an infamous editorial, said, "[Steele] brings little to the team but the color of his skin."

What triggered the most recent rage over Steele was, first, the fact of his running for the U.S. Senate, and, second, a restoking of the Elkridge Country Club controversy. The Elkridge Country Club? You'll find it in greater Baltimore, and the governor of Maryland, Robert Ehrlich, held a fundraiser there in June. At the time, the club had no black members. It does now--in part, one may presume, because Ehrlich, Steele, and other influential figures asked the club to get with it.

Today, Ehrlich explains that he holds fundraisers all over the state, including at golf clubs, and he has not been in the habit of scrutinizing membership lists, or inquiring about race. What he inquires about is price: He's interested in the lowest costs on, for example, greens fees and food. At Elkridge, he and his supporters played 18 holes of golf and had a cookout. Those supporters included people of all races. Besides which, Maryland politicos and their like hold events at Elkridge all the time--we're talking about big Democrats, liberal newspaper execs, the teachers' association. (Me: "Not a lot of Republicans in that group, I imagine." Governor: "None.")

Mike Steele says that, when the press asked him about Elkridge last summer, he had just come out of a meeting on education--chiefly the education of poor blacks. And he responded that he had a hard time worrying about country-club admission when black Marylanders were in no position, financially, to join such an institution anyway. Where were our priorities? "That got played as flippant," he says--but he is far from blase about discrimination. "I remember that I took my great-aunt in 1982 to her place of employment: a country club in South Carolina. 1 had to drop her off at the back door, because she couldn't enter through the front door. And as I was leaving, I saw a sign out front that said, 'For Whites Only.' This was in 1982! If someone wants to paint me as ignorant ... Look, I know what my experience has been."

When Steele was attacked as Simple Sambo, some Maryland Democrats applauded, some kept mum, and others expressed disapproval. A legislator named Salima Marriott was not among the disapproving. "Because he is a conservative," she told the Washington Times, "he is different than most public blacks [true], and he is different than most people in our community [debatable]. His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people." But Democrats running for their party's Senate nomination did better, at least after a day or two. One of them, Kweisi Mfume--the former congressman and the former president of the NAACP--had the grace to say, "Black bigotry can be just as cruel and evil as white bigotry. There are too many bigots in too many places."

Governor Ehrlich says that, as soon as Steele announced, "the Democrats reverted to form." Certainly a great many of them did, in Maryland and beyond. "It was embarrassing, but not for us"--not for the state's Republicans. Kurt Schmoke, the former (Democratic) mayor of Baltimore, and now the dean of Howard Law School, appears to agree: "I was sad and disgusted, to hear what some of my Democratic colleagues were saying. I didn't believe it at first. It really shocked me. The public doesn't deserve this sort of thing, and Michael Steele in particular doesn't deserve it." Schmoke believes that the furor has helped Steele, in that "it has given him so much attention." Most others concur, including the candidate himself: People sense that he is something different, and figure he won't wilt. Kenneth Blackwell is Ohio's secretary of state, and he is running for governor there. He says that black Republicans--of whom he is one--should wear racial attacks as "a badge of honor": "Because if you weren't a threat," to establishments both black and white, "they wouldn't bother with you."