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

RICHES, OF A SORT

Michael Steele's story is fairly well-known, and will become even more so. There is an element of black Horatio Alger about it. Born 47 years ago in Prince George's County, Md.; raised in D.C. The family was poor, his mother working at a laundromat. But, as Steele said in his Senate announcement speech, he grew up in a "rich home--rich beyond our bank account. It was rich in character." His mother refused welfare, believing that it amounted to the government's raising her children. Young Mike was an altar boy--literally--and attended parochial schools. For college, he went to Johns Hopkins, becoming president of his senior class. He also felt the magic of Ronald Reagan. After college, he spent some time as a seminarian, and then enrolled in Georgetown Law.

Steele was not an instant success, kicking around some, striving and failing, losing money. Indeed, his financial history is an issue in the Senate campaign, with opponents sniffing around credit reports and such. But at each stage, Steele showed unusual determination and drive. In the 1980s, he got involved with the Maryland GOP, and in 1998 he sought the party's nomination for state comptroller. He finished third. But two years later, he was elected chairman of the state GOP.

Essentially, Steele is a Reaganite, and also a staunch supporter of George W. Bush. (Unfortunately for Steele, Bush's standing in Maryland is even lower than it is in the rest of the country. But the lieutenant governor is unlikely to run away from the president.) Ken Blackwell puts it nicely: Steele is "singularly focused on empowering people. He's not a statist, but a firm believer in individual dignity." He is both anti-abortion and anti-capital punishment. (Governor Ehrlich takes the opposite positions.) In a bit of heterodoxy--or further heterodoxy, if you count the stance against capital punishment--he is a supporter of affirmative action, though not in crude forms. In his speech at the 2004 national convention, he cited a striking list of heroes: Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, and Maebell Turner. This last is the candidate's mother, a strong Roosevelt Democrat, even now.

I have read somewhere that he is a member of the NAACP. Is it true? "Yes," says Steele, "it's true. That reminds me: I have to renew my membership." Steele stresses the bipartisan, or nonpartisan, roots of the organization. "Julian Bond and others have turned it into something else, but the NAACP was always above party and ideology, interested in only what was right, period." Steele is not yet ready to give up on it.

In 2002, Ehrlich, a U.S. congressman, asked Steele to join him on the gubernatorial ticket. The odds were heavily stacked against the Republicans: Maryland is 2 to 1 Democratic, and there hadn't been a Republican governor since ... Agnew, not a reassuring name. As Ehrlich is the first to admit, the conditions had to be "perfect" for his campaign to succeed, "and the campaign had to be perfect, too." They were, and it was. Steele--handsome, personable, dynamic--did his part. Maryland Republicans are pleased to note that the state had never before had a mixed-race ticket, and, lo, it was a Republican one. But make no mistake, says Ehrlich: "Mike was not put on the ticket with the idea that he would generate black votes. We're not naive. But we were reformers, and we were presenting a different kind of party." Steele, Ehrlich is fond of saying, is "inconvenient"--inconvenient to elites both black and white. "He upsets their notion of what a black man should be, what he ought to think. He is his own person."