No Liberal Celebration For Steele

Via live coverage on C-SPAN, it's our pleasure to report to you that after much debate, the Republican National Committee has succumbed to its better angels and elected Michael Steele of Maryland to be their next chairman. They managed to avoid having a guy who became a Republican because the Democrats desegregated his school in the 1950s, be the public face and leader of the party for the next four years. If just barely.

But then, no one ever said change was easy. Especially when you've got a party as thoroughly retrograde as today's GOP. Granted, their new guy (who is expected, per Ken Blackwell, to lead them back into the majority again), seems to have little to offer in the way of ideas beyond

the same tired old GOP plonk upon which he ran for Senate in 2006, when he got drilled by Ben Cardin, and

he likes puppies.

In fact, Steele's 2006 campaign (when he trumpeted the support of "Steele Democrats", of whom there appeared to be about seven), reveals the biggest weakness for Steele - he's a political cipher, who represents change for the GOP only on the most superficial of levels.

His narrow victory indicates the serious rift within the GOP between those who desire some kind of nebulous change from recent failures (the Steele option), and those who want to keep doing things the same way (the Dawson option). And Steele offers no theory on how to unify the splitting Republican Party. But you can't have everything.

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