想说爱你不容易
None of the guests seemed to be complaining, yet Michael Steele stood at a Fifth Avenue fund-raiser in New York on Wednesday evening and defended his month-old tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee. His glasses had been askew since he pleaded his case on television that morning, and now he threw up his arms in admission.
Yes, some of his problems in the job were "self inflicted," he said, "but I do things to get a reaction."
There is no wondering which things he meant. Since taking office, Steele has joyfully gone to war with his own party, often live on television.
While most leaders in American politics wave the party flag, Steele smiles and shreds it. A man of constantly colliding analogies, he compares Republicans to drunks in need of a 12-step program and to the mentally ill. He has insulted Rush Limbaugh and moderate Republican senators alike, and he has promised a "hip-hop makeover" that would attract even "one-armed midgets" to his party.
Steele is the party's first African-American chairman, his election a response to a history-making Democratic president. But now his performance is inspiring questions: Does he have a strategy, or is he simply saying whatever comes to mind? Republican moderates have staked hopes of reform on him, betting that his race and frank style will foster a new image of the party, but is this what they expected?
"I'm trying to move an elephant that's become mired in its own muck," Steele said in an interview last week in his sunlit Capitol Hill office, pausing whenever he appeared on the giant television close by his desk.
"You can say, 'He's crazy, he's running off at the mouth,"' he said. "Or you can say, 'It kind of makes sense, and I get it."'
Since he became chairman, Steele, 50, has shown some of the same impulses that have governed and sometimes sabotaged him from an early age. He has often rejected his own environment - becoming a Republican when everyone he knew was a Democrat, leaving jobs after short stints and attacking those who helped make him successful.
Steele has often been a victim of his own impetuousness. He worked his way through law school at night and won a job at a top firm, but he failed the Maryland bar exam because, he says, he took it on a whim. He is a born actor, a high-school musical ham whose instinct to perform can undermine his credibility (in the interview, he said he would accept a recent challenge to a hip-hop duel issued by the television host Stephen Colbert).
Even those who applaud Steele's vision of a more inclusive Republican Party wonder if he can execute it.
