Michael Steele took to the airwaves today to try and fix his highly tarnished record. That of course didn’t work out too well as Steele tried to pull out the race card, something he said he never does just a few short months ago.
As if that isn’t bad, now we have the news that one of the RNC’s top fundraisers has called it quits:
Former Ambassador Sam Fox, a top supporter of George W. Bush who was one of the co-chairmen of the Republican Regents — the RNC’s top-level fundraising board — has left the post, two Republican sources said.
Fox, a Missouri businessman who was Bush’s ambassador to Belgium, was one of the RNC’s few remaining connections to the deep-pocketed Republican establishment and was viewed as the heaviest hitter among its fundraisers.
Fox didn’t return a call seeking comment.
But Fox was “deeply troubled by the pattern of self-inflicted wounds and missteps,” another major Republican fundraiser told me today, and had “lost confidence” in Steele.
This needs to be put into some perspective. We have a mid-term election year in which the minority party is trailing the majority party in money on hand. That is extremely uncommon, but now the RNC has the added problem of their revenue streams drying up even more.
There are a lot of people saying Steele will hold on until after the elections. For the sake of our side, I certainly hope so. I almost don’t see that happening though. Steele has become such a liability to the GOP that keeping him around would probably do more harm than good for Republicans trying to seek election. Besides that, once we leave November’s ballot box, we go right to the 2012 Presidential cycle and that’s where the RNC really matters.
If Republicans want to help their chances this fall and in 2012, then they need to cut Steele loose now. He is a disaster for the RNC. The longer they keep him around, the longer he remains in the headlines. That’s just the way journalism works when it comes to politics. So either keep explaining away the disastrous chairman for another year, or replace him now and get everything out of the headlines in the next few weeks. The choice is up to the RNC.