Changing The GOP
Steele's task: transforming a party that likes the way it is.
Michael Steele's color really shouldn't matter. Yet it does. Virtually every story on his election as chair of the Republican National Committee led with the fact that he is the first African-American ever in that job. Part of why it matters is that the Republican Party has been on the wrong side of racial progress for well over a century.
The GOP, of course, was created to resist the forward march of slavery; after the Civil War, Republicans fought heroically to make former slaves at least partially whole. But all that ended along with reconstruction following the presidential election of 1876. Rutherford Hayes, a Republican, turned his back on the fight for equality; and the party leadership essentially sanctioned segregation and Jim Crow. The modern Republican Party has only the most tenuous links to the party of Lincoln; it is really the party of Richard Nixon, who made a deal with the devil in the 1970s. Nixon ceded the black vote to Democrats, leaving Republicans to cater to white resentments. That decision worked well for decades; it even gave rise to the notion of a permanent Republican governing majority. But a political party can only run in a different direction than the country for so long. And America was changing, not only in its demographics—which were increasingly ethnic and "minority"—but in its attitudes, which were increasingly inclusive.
Thoughtful Republicans have long recognized that. In 2005, then RNC chair Ken Mehlman apologized for the so-called Southern strategy. "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong," said Mehlman at the national convention of the NAACP.
In this most recent contest Steele, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland but considered a moderate and something of a party outsider, found himself in a race with a group that included a man well known for defending his membership in an all-white country club and another notorious for circulating a parody called "Barack the Magic Negro." Whatever his flaws, Steele carries no such racial baggage. And to its credit, the RNC realized it could not elect a chairman who did. And Steele's genial black face may help overcome the party's association with racial intolerance.
But the Republican Party has not just been on the wrong side of race for years; it too often has been on the wrong side, period—as even some of its leaders acknowledge. In his letter of candidacy for the RNC chairmanship, Michigan Republican Party chair Saul Anuzis observed, "We were once the party that America trusted on national security. But when intelligence failures and poor planning led to unexpected challenges in Iraq, America lost faith in our party. We were once the party of fiscal responsibility. But when members of our own party led the way in pork barrel spending, which led to the fattest federal budget in history, America lost faith in our party."
For Americans to regain faith in the party of Lincoln will require more than cosmetic change at the top. And it is not clear that Steele represents anything more than that. One of his first acts as chair was to congratulate House Republicans who voted unanimously against the Democrat's economic stimulus package. "The goose egg that you laid on the president's desk was just beautiful, absolutely beautiful," he crowed at a Republican retreat. Fair enough. Colorful, defiant oratory is always a welcome addition to political dialogue. But sticking your thumb in the president's eye is hardly equivalent to crafting a sound fiscal stimulus policy. And it's no step at all in the direction of remaking the Republican Party into the savior of working-class Americans.
But even if Steele were inclined to try to reinvent the party, it's not clear the party would let him.
Many Republicans like it pretty much the way it is. A new Rasmussen Reports survey found little appetite among Republicans for ideological moderation. Indeed, 55 percent of Republican respondents said the party should be more like Sarah Palin—which means, I suppose, that the GOP needs to become prettier and more belligerent.
Steele's current line is less about fundamental change than about the party doing a better job selling what it is—or at least what it has been. "How we message … is how we messed up the last time," he declared on Fox News last Sunday. But the problem is not just the Republican selling job. (George Bush was pretty good at that; at least initially.) It's the Republican reality. And unless Steele recognizes that and is empowered to act on that knowledge, it's hard to see how his smiling face will make much difference.
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Ellis Cose, author, columnist and contributing editor (since 1993) for Newsweek magazine and former chairman of the editorial board and editorial page editor of the New York Daily News, began his journalism career as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times—becoming, at the age of 19, the youngest editorial page columnist ever employed by a major Chicago daily. Cose, who is also an independent radio producer, is a popular campus lecturer and public speaker.
In addition to serving as a columnist, editor and national correspondent for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cose has been a contributor and press critic for Time magazine, president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Journalism Education, chief writer on management and workplace issues for USA Today (where he has also served as an occasional columnist and member of the board of contributors) and a member of the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press. He has also been a fellow at the Gannett Center for Media Studies at Columbia University, at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow and director of energy policy studies at the Washington-based Joint Center for Political Studies, and a consultant to the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.
Cose's Bone to Pick: On Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation and Revenge, was published by Atria (a Simon and Schuster imprint) in April 2004. The book is a wide-ranging look at a number of societies—the United States, Ghana, South Africa, East Timor, and Peru among them—and their ways of coping with cruelty and pain. The Washington Post had this to say: "The complex questions surrounding 'forgiveness, reconciliation, reparation, and revenge' probably require a scholarship of jurisprudence, philosophy, psychology, history and literature. This is the kind of ambitious enterprise that the world's great religions deal with. But Cose meets the challenge, and Bone to Pick ranges over centuries of contested histories, across five continents, spinning individual tragedies in and out of collective traumas, seeking the nature of 'forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values.' … The truth may be a prized (and politicized) commodity in the quest for social justice, but as Cose observes, quoting Czech novelist Milan Kundera, 'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.' Bone to Pick is a timely reminder of that axiom and a useful addition to the canon of that struggle."
Cose's The Envy of the World, an in-depth essay on the state of black men in America, was published by Washington Square Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) in 2002 and has appeared on several best-seller lists, including the Essence magazine list, where it was number one. Newsweek featured the book on its cover and National Public Radio produced a special a program based on it. Kirkus Reviews called The Envy of the World, "A slender volume with a substantial and significant message." The Washington Post described it as "lucid, eloquent and deeply personal book." The Chicago Tribune called its author "a gifted, rhapsodic essayist." "Cose charts both an urgently argued history of black masculinity and a moving and nuanced snapshot of where it is now," declared Publishers' Weekly. The paperback edition was published in January 2003.
In May 2004 the Rockefeller Foundation issued Beyond Brown v. Board: The Final Battle for Excellence in American Education—a major report authored by Cose on the legacy of the historic Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and the current challenges facing American educators. The report was the basis of a Newsweek cover feature and for a David Broder column and other stories in the national press. In November 2006, the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC's Annenberg School published Cose's Killing Affirmative Action: Would ending it really result in a better, more perfect Union? That report, featured in several newspaper and in Newsweek magazine, examined California's 10-year experience living with Proposition 209, the measure that ended affirmative action in the public sector in California.
Cose's best-selling The Rage of a Privileged Class, a book-length essay on race in America, was published by HarperCollins in January 1994. It was featured as a Newsweek cover story and described by The New York Times Book Review as a "disciplined, graceful exposition of a neglected aspect of the subject of race in America." His A Man's World (published by HarperCollins in June 1995), was featured in a front page review in The New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post called it "a valuable, cogent and well-written contribution to an enormously complex subject."
Color-Blind: Seeing Beyond Race in a Race-Obsessed World (published in January 1997 and also excerpted in Newsweek) explored America's continuing obsession with race. The New York Times Book Review called it "a book this country desperately needs, one with genuine healing potential," and included Color-Blind among its best book of the year recommendations for 1997. Cose edited an essay collection entitled The Darden Dilemma published by HarperCollins in March 1997. His debut novel, The Best Defense, was published by HarperCollins in September 1998 ("a formidable first novel...crisp, fast-paced and engaging. In a genre glutted with lightweight fare, The Best Defense reaches higher"— The Seattle Times).
Cose is also the author of A Nation of Strangers, a history of American immigration, published by William Morrow and Co. in 1992 and of The Press, published by Morrow in 1989. He is the author of Energy and the Urban Crisis (1979) and the editor of Energy and Equity: Some Social Concerns (1978), both published by the Joint Center for Political Studies. He also wrote The Rebirth of Community Power, published by Westview Press: 1983.
At the Institute for Journalism Education (at the University of California, Berkeley), Cose designed and directed a widely quoted study on journalism careers published by IJE: The Quiet Crisis: Minority Journalists and Newsroom Opportunity (1985). He also instituted and served as inaugural director of IJE's Management Training Center at Northwestern University.
In his capacity as president of Ellis Cose, Inc. Cose has produced, written and hosted the pilot for a multimedia documentary series: "Against the Odds." The radio project (which has received funding from the Ford Foundation and will be distributed by Public Radio International) profiles individuals who have overcome tremendous adversity. It aspires to provide continuing and better coverage—in public radio but also on the web and in other media, including print—of people and communities often relegated to the margins of society. It also aims to stimulate thinking on how they, and their respective societies, can overcome that marginalization. The pilot focuses on a young man from a refugee camp in northern Kenya who, studying by the light of a rechargeable lamp, managed to get himself into Princeton University.
Cose has appeared on The Today Show, Nightline, Dateline, ABC Evening News, Good Morning America, the PBS "Time to Choose" election special, Charlie Rose, CNN's Talk Back Live, and a variety of other nationally televised and local programs. He has been interviewed for British, Brazilian and Canadian television. He is also a judge for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Cose has received fellowships or individual grants from the Ford Foundation, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, and numerous journalism awards—including the University of Missouri medal for career excellence and distinguished service in journalism, two Clarion awards, and four National Association of Black Journalists first place awards. He was also named the 2002 winner of the New York Association of Black Journalists' lifetime achievement award, winner of the 2003 award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists as well as the winner of two New York Association of Black Journalists' first place 2003 awards for commentary and magazine features. In 2004 Cose was named the first recipient of the newly inaugurated annual Vision Award from the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. In 2006 he won a Unity award for commentary and also shared in a first place award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
A Chicago native, Cose holds a master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy from George Washington University. He is married to Lee Llambelis, former legal director for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and current director of intergovernmental relations for the Attorney General of New York. He has a daughter, Elisa Maria.
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