Michael Steele

Michael Steele (born October 19, 1958, Andrews Air Force Base, Prince George’s county, Maryland, U.S.) is an American politician, the first African American to serve as chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC; 2009–2011).

Steele attended Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B.A. (1981) in international relations. A devout Roman Catholic, he studied for the priesthood for several years at a seminary associated with Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania, before enrolling at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. After earning a J.D. (1991), Steele remained in Washington and practiced international law for six years at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. In 1997 he left that firm to become counsel for a real estate company in Virginia.

Although Steele was raised a Democrat, he turned to the Republican Party as an adult, a change he later attributed to his widowed mother’s refusal to apply for welfare and his belief in Republican Pres. Ronald Reagan’s philosophy of self-reliance. In 1994 Steele became chair of the Prince George’s County Republican Party Central Committee. He left that post in 2000 to head the Maryland Republican Party State Central Committee. In 2002 Maryland Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert Ehrlich selected him as the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor. Although Democratic voters heavily outnumbered Republicans in Maryland, Ehrlich and Steele claimed a narrow election victory, and Steele became the first African American to win statewide office there, serving from 2003 to 2007. In November 2006 Steele was the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, but he lost by a wide margin to Democrat Ben Cardin. The following February he became chair of GOPAC, a conservative Republican political action committee that had been led (1986–95) by Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich.

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Following the election on November 4, 2008, of Democrat Barack Obama as the first African American U.S. president, the RNC chair became vacant, and Steele was encouraged to run for the post. Many commentators believed that Steele could inject new life into the party, help counteract Obama’s charismatic appeal to moderates, and assist the party in reaching out to African Americans. On January 30, 2009, Steele was elected chairman of the RNC, becoming the first African American to serve in the post. Steele’s election, which occurred after six rounds of balloting, came about after former Ohio secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell (another African American candidate for the chairmanship) withdrew before the fifth ballot and endorsed Steele, who ultimately defeated South Carolina Republican Party chairman Katon Dawson 91–77.

Shortly after his victory, Steele called for a Republican makeover to widen the GOP’s appeal to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.” During his tenure as RNC chairman, Steele gained a reputation for making controversial remarks. He quickly became involved in an imbroglio with the party’s conservative base. Responding to comment that Rush Limbaugh, a highly influential radio talk-show host, was “the de facto leader of the Republican Party,” Steele dismissed Limbaugh as an entertainer and stated that he (Steele) was “the de facto leader.” Steele quickly backtracked from his comments, however, apologizing to Limbaugh and calling him a “national conservative leader.” During a particularly bitter special election in New York in 2009, Steele criticized other Republicans, including Sarah Palin, the party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, who had endorsed a Conservative Party candidate rather than the Republican standard bearer. Steele said, “If you don’t live in the district, you don’t vote there, your opinion really doesn’t matter very much.” In January 2010 Steele upset Republican members of Congress when he suggested that the party could not win control of the House of Representatives in that year’s midterm elections. In July Steele faced calls for his resignation by many prominent Republicans following erroneous comments he made that the war in Afghanistan was “a war of Obama’s choosing” and that it was “not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”

Steele also evoked controversy when it was revealed that he had accepted large speaking fees from organizations, a practice criticized by several former party leaders. His statements and his introduction of a health care plan without consultation with Republican congressional leaders led some Republicans to ask him to refrain from interfering in matters of policy. Still, as head of the RNC, Steele was instrumental in directing the Republican opposition to Obama and pursued a conservative agenda on a range of issues, including abortion, gay rights, global warming, and health care. His approach to combating the administration was summarized in Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda (2010).

Although Republicans posted impressive gains in the November 2010 midterm elections, Steele’s popularity continued to fade. He ran for a second term as chairman in January 2011, but he withdrew from contention after the fourth round of balloting, stating that the Republican Party had signaled that it was ready for a new direction. Later that year Steele became a political analyst on the television news network MSNBC. In 2018 he became a faculty fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.

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In the 2016 presidential election, Steele refused to vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, and he grew increasingly critical after Trump won. Steele later became (2020) a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans that sought the defeat of Trump and other Republican politicians in the 2020 elections.