Word: rnc
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...Michael Steele as its first-ever African American chairman. Evidently, Steele's rivals had failed to convince the 168-member committee that they could adapt to a post-racial, web-driven political era. Take Chip Saltsman, Mike Huckabee's ex-presidential campaign manager and an early candidate for the RNC seat who dropped out of the race after word spread that he had distributed a song called "Barack the Magic Negro" a few weeks after Obama's victory. The incumbent, Mike Duncan, was forced to admit during a campaign debate that he didn't use Twitter (gasp!), and Katon Dawson...
Steele won the race for the RNC's chairmanship on the fifth ballot by a vote of 91 to 77 against Katon Dawson, chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, who was hobbled by his previous membership in an all-white country club. At one point, one of Steele's rivals was Ken Blackwell, an African American and a former Ohio secretary of state, who was widely viewed as too dogmatically conservative to head a party desperate for moderation and who eventually threw his support behind Steele. The original slate of candidates included Tennessee GOP chairman Chip Saltsman...
...days following John McCain's loss to Barack Obama, Steele declared on Fox News his interest in the RNC chairmanship - even though the sitting chair had not said he was leaving at the start of the new presidential Administration (and indeed, Mike Duncan was one of the candidates Steele defeated in Friday's vote). In a TIME interview during that period, Steele praised Obama's election as America's first black President. He made clear that as RNC chairman, he would move to temper the party's rigidity and truculence. In particular, one of the models he pointed...
...reality." Said he: "To my way of thinking, we must do both, and quickly." In the blueprint, Steele clearly borrows key elements of Obama's groundbreaking tactic for generating record levels of donations with innovative social-networking tools. He calls himself a "technology geek," and already posted on the RNC's main website is his "Network for the Future," which features links to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn and blip.tv. At the very least, Steele knows his party needs to play catch...
Steele says if he is selected as the RNC's chairman in January, he will move swiftly to temper the party's tone, using the model of Ronald Reagan, who, he says, "made it cool to be a conservative." But one of Steele's more daunting mandates will to be to broaden the GOP's base of black voters. "I'll tell local chairmen, 'If you want to be chairman under my leadership, don't think this is a country-club atmosphere where we sit around drinking wine and eating cheese and talking amongst ourselves. If you don't want...