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In Bold Move, RNC Replaces Steele with Ron Paul
Written by on April 01, 2009, 05:13 PM
In a bold move to regain confidence among their conservative base, the Republican National Committee has replaced Chairman Michael Steele with GOP Congressman Ron Paul.Today is also April 1, and such a story could only be a joke. Paul is one of many fiscally principled Republicans in Congress. Yet, to suggest that a proven fiscal conservative could actually be a leader in the GOP is nothing more than an April Fools' joke. Why must it be this way? The Republican Party has plenty of people high within its own ranks who could easily be a beacon of hope for conservatives disillusioned with the Republican Party. Instead, the current Republican leadership continues to promote and support the same people in power who helped destroy the credibility of the GOP. "Now that a Democrat is again in the White House, the Republicans again claim to endorse those sacred values. But there is the small matter of how they behaved in the eight years George W. Bush was in power," writes Paul Mulshine, a conservative columnist for the New Jersey Star-Ledger. "And they behaved like . . . let me think of an appropriate invective . . . Oh, yeah, they behaved like Democrats." "And now that we have a real Democratic president, they have no grounds to criticize him," Mulshine adds. The joke is on the Republican Party, and if the consequences weren't so dire, it might actually be funny. Remember in June of last year when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell "punished" Harry Reid for failing to approve three of Bush’s judicial nominees? Remember how all the punishment turned out to be was reading every page of a 491-page climate bill, which took 10 hours to complete? Then, remember how five months later, Democrats walked away with the 2008 election, delivering the Republican Party its second consecutive electoral defeat? It appears Democrats got the last laugh. The lack of substance and leadership from the GOP is the real joke—not this blog's headline, or the childish antics of Republican leadership. Steele's comments last month—calling abortion an "individual choice" and stating gay marriage should be decided by the states—only drove the party further into infighting and confusion. Steele's numerous fumbled public remarks have pushed GOP strategists to call for Steele to focus more on the party's message, and less on his own. In response to the uproar surrounding his comments, Steele (who first made waves when he called conservative icon Rush Limbaugh's tactics "ugly" and "incendiary") pled for an end to the GOP infighting, and suggested Republicans mirror his leadership: "unconventional, unpredictable … to do from time to time the unexpected." Much like McConnell's failed leadership in the Senate, Steele has yet to find a voice that unifies or inspires his party. If the GOP expects to mount a return to the political Promised Lands, it will show that principled, conservative leadership is more than just an April Fools' Day article. New Comment |


In a bold move to regain confidence among their conservative base, the Republican National Committee has replaced Chairman Michael Steele with GOP Congressman Ron Paul.
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