2012

Steele for President?

Not as crazy as you think.

Why has Michael Steele said so many weird, embarrassing things since becoming chair of the Republican National Committee? Maybe because he’s going to run for president, Politico’s Roger Simon argues. Democratic presidential candidates—even victorious ones—haven’t won a majority of the white vote for decades. (They usually win by combining an overwhelming majority of black voters and a large minority of white voters.) As a black Republican, Steele could win much of a typical Republican’s white voters and carve out a bit of Democrats’ slice of black voters. It would be a way to defeat Obama next campaign. Sure, Steele has said some goofy things, but 2012 is a long way off. And he’s already setting himself up, by calling Afghanistan a war “of Obama’s choosing.” He may be mocked as unserious, but political history is littered with serious losers, like Michael Dukakis and Al Gore. “So when you look at Michael Steele, you are not seeing a man wildly blundering,” Simon says. “You are seeing at a man running for president. It just looks like the same thing.”