Racing To Play, Part 2

With Michael Steele playing the race card today on his critics, Josh Marshall of TPM argues that Steele only ended up with the RNC job in the first place because of his race.

Michael Steele got the job for one reason: Republicans needed someone who could be the point man for bashing Barack Obama while being immune not only from charges of racism but any discussion of the fact that the current GOP is a party made up pretty much 100% of white folks. As is common with Republicans, Steele is the mirror image, ersatz Obama. Whatever else you can say about the 44th president, in the 2008 campaign and to a great degree still, he was a phenomenon, a meteoric political figure whose power on the political stage was much greater than the sum of his parts.

In different ways race played into the Obama phenomenon. But Republicans were always basically full of it and barking up the wrong tree when they tried to claim either that Democrats picked Barack Obama because he was black or that he was winning because he was black. So what did the Republicans do: turn around and hire someone to lead their party pretty much for the sole reason that he was black. As is so often the case, the critics of racial progress, because they don't comprehend it, resort to a parody of it.

Steele was hired because he was black. And the other truth is that now he can't be fired, in significant measure, because he's black. Because canning Steele now would only drive home the reality that Republicans were trying to paper over, fairly clumsily, when they hired him in the first place. So Republicans are stuck with his myriad goofs and #pressfails and incompetent management and all the rest because of a set of circumstances entirely of their own making. 

And everything Marshall says here makes absolute sense.  Michael Steele got the top job in the Republican Party right now as de facto leader specifically because of his race...to counter criticism that Republicans are racists.  Marshall is also correct that Steele can't be fired now, because if they do, they admit that's why he was hired in the first place.

It's pretty sad and pathetic.  But that's how Republicans see the world.  It's a bold claim to make and Marshall is going to take some pretty nuclear heat for stating the obvious here, probably all sorts of boycotts and idiocy and press blackouts for TPM, and pressure to take his outfit apart.  The GOP as a matter of fact will scramble to take the focus off Steele and put it on Josh Marshall.  You can count on that.

Remember when the GOP backlash comes that the issue isn't how Josh Marshall sees race, but how Republican party leaders see it.