Daniel Larison cautions against mocking Michael Steele:
All that said, let’s give Steele a break for a moment. This is not necessarily that different from Howard Dean’s famous “guys with Confederate flags in their trucks” line, which was tone-deaf in its own way but at least demonstrated some awareness that his party consistently failed to win the votes of most white men in national elections. However, the idea that Dean was trying to articulate was that the Democrats had to try to compete in all fifty states and pursue voters whom they had largely neglected and ignored, especially in regions where the party had been competitive in the past. Five years after he said that, the Democrats are the majority in Congress, control the White House and are well-represented among the governors and state legislatures around the country. It is safe to say that Dean was as far removed culturally from Confederate flag-owning white men as Steele is removed from the voters he is referring to here, as the clumsiness of the remarks makes clear, but Dean did have some idea how to translate his clumsy pander into something like an effective method of recruiting local candidates who could compete in traditionally hostile territory. Jim Webb, Heath Shuler and Travis Childers are just a few examples of the success of that approach.
I’m not sure that Howard Dean’s “Confederate Flag” example is really comparable in terms of the political landscape. Yes, that remark was clumsy and patronizing, but it also didn’t work on the presidential level: Obama got only a slightly larger amount of the white vote than John Kerry, but received a much larger share of votes from nonwhites than Kerry did. All of which is to say that while Dean’s clumsy appeal could afford to fail because of the changing demographics of the country, Steele’s can’t. On whether Steele will be able to pick candidates who can compete in “traditionally hostile territory,” I share Larison’s skepticism: “It is also not certain that the rest of the GOP leadership will go along with a similar recruiting effort in the Midwest, New England and the Pacific West if it means backing candidates who are insufficiently party-line on this or that issue.” Republicans seem more concerned with ideological conformity than Democrats were when they were trying to get back in the game.
— A. Serwer
