Republican bigwigs vote for a new party chairman Friday. With Michael Steele on the ropes, who’s likely to emerge as top dog? The Daily Beast previews the contenders. Plus, what black Republicans think about Steele.
Republican National Committee members are gathering in Michael Steele’s backyard Friday afternoon, hunkering down in a Maryland hotel to decide the fate of the controversial RNC leader. But the former Maryland lieutenant governor has little reason to feel comfortable, even with the home cooking.
Clockwise, from top left: Maria Cino, Saul Anuzis, Ann Wagner, and Reince Priebus.
According to early vote counts, Steele is on his way out the door. During his two years at the helm of the GOP fundraising machine, the 52-year-old sometime lawyer has been criticized by party elders for turning the RNC into a den of debt and delinquency. Remember that whole West Hollywood sex club fiasco?
Well, the 168 RNC members voting today certainly do. Here are the leading candidates to replace Steele. All are party insiders with deep experience in Republican organizing.
Reince Priebus
Reince Priebus, the Wisconsin Republican Party chairman, likely presents the strongest inside challenge to Steele. In December, Priebus resigned from his position as top legal counsel at the RNC to take a run at Steele. For some, the biggest knock on Priebus is his relationship to Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and his political operative nephew Henry. Some critics, like right-wing blogger Dan Riehl, see Priebus as a mere stalking horse for Barbour’s presidential pretensions. Also joining Team Priebus is Republican big brain Paul Ryan, who was making calls for the candidate this week. Priebus also has the support of newly elected Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, whose victory over liberal lion Russ Feingold in November was a highlight for the GOP.
Ann Wagner
Ann Wagner jumped into the RNC race early. If she can pull out a victory (or rival Maria Cino), she’ll be the first woman elected to head the RNC. As chairwoman of the Missouri Republican Party, she is credited with turning the state legislature from blue to red, winning statewide races and crucial votes for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Coming off those victories, she became the RNC co-chairwoman before Bush appointed her to be ambassador to Luxembourg. In an interview with The Daily Beast Wagner gave a not-so-subtle dig to the chairman she hopes to replace and explained why she'll be better at raising money, "It's not just restoring a certain level of credibility in being good stewards of our donors' investments," she said, "but frankly just going out and making the ask." Wagner is still fighting an uphill battle. She’s got an ally in fellow Missourian, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Maria Cino
Maria Cino, a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry and a former Bush administration official, is hoping to ride a number of prominent endorsements to victory in the RNC race. She honed her election skills as political director of Bush's 2000 campaign and later became deputy chair of the RNC, also tasked with political operations. Her work has brought her some powerful friends over the years—she has the backing of former Vice President Dick Cheney and recently scored a coveted endorsement from Speaker of the House John Boehner. It's unclear how much influence outside backing has on the more insular RNC, however. “Cino’s establishment cred could cut both ways,” Politico's Chris Frates wrote after she announced. “As a GOP insider and Pfizer lobbyist, Cino will likely take heat from the Tea Party wing of the party.
Saul Anuzis
Saul Anuzis is no stranger to the RNC race, having lost to Michael Steele in 2009. The former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party remains a GOP heavyweight and is popular with the conservative grassroots. Anuzis has pledged to rededicate the RNC to fundraising, where it's seen an exodus of major donors under Steele. "I think that overall my message is that different circumstances and different challenges require a different chairman," Anuzis told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. "In the last cycle we were looking for a national spokesperson, somebody to be the face and voice of the party, but this cycle we need someone to make the trains run on time and get the money to implement our ground game." Anuzis is still considered an underdog in the race, if a formidable one.
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Good stuff, albeit understandably similar to Ryan’s speech last night, right down to the setting and studiously soft-spoken delivery. Even so, I want to promote it as a way of patting him on the back for floating his proposal for $500 billion in cuts this year. That plan is dead on arrival, needless to say, but passing it isn’t what Paul is after. What he’s trying to do with that eyepopping number is communicate the magnitude of the problem to the public in hopes of moving the Overton window on spending — because if this new Gallup poll is right, it’s going to need a lot of moving. And not just among Democrats, either:
Not a single point’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats on Social Security despite fiscal responsibility having rocketed to the top of the conservative policy agenda over the past two years. I don’t know how else to account for that except as a near-catastrophic failure by prominent Republicans to explain even to their own base that eliminating earmarks and cutting NPR’s funding and canceling a pie-in-the-sky defense project or two isn’t remotely equal to the task of guaranteeing sustainability. Case in point: Not only didn’t Ryan squarely address Social Security and Medicare last night (“the politics of evasion,” Ross Douthat calls it) but even a fearless deficit hawk like Paul, speaking only to an online audience, didn’t go after them here. Anyone who’s serious about balancing the budget long-term must support entitlement reform, no matter how unpleasant the prospect might be, but rarely does the public hear that point made by a prominent politician. And the entirely predictable tragedy of last night’s SOTU, as Tom Coburn argued in his op-ed this morning, is that only leadership from the most prominent politician of all is realistically capable of moving public opinion on this — yet that leadership was almost entirely absent last night. Writes Yuval Levin of the missed opportunity, “This speech was worse than bland and empty, it was a dereliction of duty.” And here’s Matt Welch:
[T]he president, though he is much more serious on this issue than a huge swath of his political party, is nonetheless not remotely serious about this issue. Vowing to cut $400 billion over 10 years (a plan that, judging by the two people clapping when he proposed it, will likely be cut to ribbons if it survives through Congress), at a moment when the deficit for this year is more than three times that, indicates that Democrats (and a helluva lot of Republicans as well) are hunkering down in our awful status quo–half-heartedly tinkering around the edges of spending, making incremental changes this way and that, then launching new moonshots and redoubling old impotent efforts. Politicians have put us on the precipice of financial ruin, and they show no indication of doing a damned thing about it.
And I think they know it. Look at the plaintive, semi-desperate, Stuart Smalleyesque mantra Obama kept repeating at the end: “We do big things.” By his insistence his anxiety shall be revealed. We don’t do big things, America, not in the moonshotty Marshall Plan way of speechwriters’ cliche box. Increasingly, we don’t do little things, either–like keeping libraries open five days a week in California. What we do is snarf up ever-larger portions of your grandkids’ money for purposes that are usually obscure and often criminal.
Read his whole post, including and especially the concluding line. Just as I’m writing this, and as a prelude to Paul’s video, the AP is across the wires with news from CBO that its projections for Social Security were wrong: They used to believe that the program wouldn’t start running permanent deficits until 2016, but it turns out the deficits will begin this year. (We’ll likely have a separate post on that later.) Like Paul says, the day of reckoning is at hand.
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