¶ Intro / Opening
From Kerkow media. So what are you going to do about it?
You know, we have a habit of consuming all things, news and politics through the filter of our own opinion. But sometimes new situations arise or sometimes we listen to both sides of a complicated issue and we learn something different. Or sometimes if we're willing to give it some thought, we may even find that we've changed our minds. Our guest today served as the chairman of the Republican National Committee and some of his views may surprise you. So
stick around. This is politics. Meet me in the middle. I'm Bill Kurtis. Once again, my co-host is Jane Albrecht as an international trade attorney. She fought for U.S. economic and business interests to high level government officials in many countries.
She's a member
of the U.S. Supreme
Court bar and she's also been
involved with several U.S. presidential campaigns.
Welcome, Jane. Thanks. Always nice to be here and welcome, Michael.
Michael Steele is an American conservative political commentator and attorney and a former Republican Party politician. He served as the seventh lieutenant governor of Maryland. By the way, he was the first African-American elected to any statewide office in Maryland. He's also served as chairperson of the Republican National Committee. And he was the first African-American to serve in that capacity as well.
You've seen him
on CNN and MSNBC, FOX and
frankly, everywhere,
as he's often in the news outlets for his perspectives. Back in 20/20, like some other lifelong Republicans, he formally endorsed Joe Biden for the presidency. Michael, thank you for joining us today. This is exciting.
Thank you. It's good to be here. Absolutely.
¶ Still a Republican
Michael, you've said that you're still a Republican. Does that hold true today
as we speak? Yeah, still
does. Haters will hate and
God bless them.
But I've been in this a lot longer than a lot of the haters who just showed up. And for me, it's tough. I'm not I don't want to play it off. And, you know, I turn a blind eye to some of the horrendously racist and xenophobic and, quite
frankly, ugly behavior
of some of the members of my party. But like any good person, parent
leader, you try to
correct bad behavior. And so far, at least now, I welcome standing in that breach to talk about
the ideas and the
ideals of a once proud party that though many may have disagreed with some of our policy prescriptions, they they did not view us through the very narrow and ugly lenses that we portray ourselves today. And it's important to understand why that is why that
lens has sort of been
created as a look for the party. And those of us inside have seen this coming for quite some time. I think it's still, at least right now, Bill, worth standing in the breach to try to correct it
before we get into the whole scenario of where the party is and where it's going. I think I'd like
¶ What if you were the chair again?
to come in the side door, if you don't mind. And sure, for the sake of this question, congratulations, Michael. You are again, the chairman of the Republican Party. So I'm not asking you here what you or the party won't be any more right now. We'll get to that later. What are the specific steps that you will now take to make it your party again?
Well, that's that's a tough question to answer, because that answer requires a commitment not just from someone from one person, but an entire group of people. We all have to be on the same mind and same page about what the party is and what it isn't. So while I may try to, as I did when I was national chairman, move the party to embrace not just his historic past, but what I think would be an important and a historic future that most closely resemble the emerging diversity of
this great experiment we call America. You've got to have buy into that. People have got to believe and want that to be a part of their own journey, their own story, as I said, to chairman of the state parties in the National Committee, men and women who
work with them. We know them
affectionately as the one hundred and sixty eight members who make up the RNC. That I'm not a Pied Piper, no chairman is a Pied Piper. What I try to do is give guidance and direction, give vision and purpose, elevate our principles and ideas. But it matters what you do on the ground. And if you're not down with expanding the party's influence and base among a growing, diverse population of voters, it won't happen no matter what I preach.
Are you saying, Michael, that you think it's kind of
¶ Is the Republican Party Beyond help?
beyond help or can you, as a leader of the party, make some moves that are going to set it in the right direction?
Yeah, I think it's not beyond help at this point. You've got to have leaders who are willing to state the case and make the case in front of the party as a whole and and give them their charge that you'll either pick up that charge and agree. Yes, we like an expanding, diverse base of African-Americans, Hispanics, gay and lesbian Americans, etc., or we don't. We want to have a more isolated, insulated base of white segregationist Republican men. So you tell me which way you want to go.
And that would tell me whether or not the party is prepared to move into its future. Look, at the end of the day, Bill, if you don't want help, you won't get helped. If you don't change your behavior, then you will continue to do bad. Things or behave in a way that does not help you, so, you know, when you have people inside the party who are doubling down and coming out of the 20 20 election and certainly coming on after January six, saying that this is
Trump's party, everybody get used to it. Well, we know what Trump and Trump ism has meant and what it has done. So if you're telling me that's who we are, then, OK, you've now drawn a line that I'm willing to fight for or fight over. I may or may not win that battle, but I just don't walk away. I've been doing this for far too long, just to walk away
from stupid that's standing in front of me. So my thing is, let's push back against stupid the you know, the Idiocracy that is now the leadership of the GOP in many respects, that blindly follows a man who is neither a conservative nor Republican who is devoid of any values set or principles that anyone would want to impart to their own children, let alone a nation, and see where we are.
¶ The Southern Strategy
Michael, this is admirable, but you act
like the Republican Party is an innocent victim to all this. In fact, they made a pact with the devil back when they adopted the Southern Strategy.
Sure.
It's really not gone away.
Well, look, it's not just a Southern strategy, but it's also, you know, it's the same pack that the Democrats made.
So, no, it's not the same pack that the Democrats may yell
for about one hundred years. This is the problem. Everybody wants to put them in nice little neat partisan buckets. And the reality of it is this is our political system. It is something that is a scourge on both parties who played a role in animating and pushing out these narratives, particularly in the race based so that Southern strategy came to life. Why? Because Lyndon Johnson, who himself was a
segregationist, decided
political expediency, history, all of that to embrace basically Robert Kennedy's agenda on
civil rights that was
born into the sort of voting rights space in the civil rights space, which you had Republicans that Johnson leaned on to help get that through in sixty four. In sixty five. So so but it goes back to what what you saw in the nineteen sixty four presidential race when Barry Goldwater doubled down on segregation, because that's the beginning of the Southern Strategy. Remember, the South was Democratic, not Republican at that time. The North was Republican. I
remember that shift to the South. Becoming Republican was part of the strategy because you could not win a presidential
race without picking up states in the South. And so the calculation going back to Goldwater, which is why you had that embrace in Goldwater later on in his life, repudiated that stand in sixty four because he realized what Pandora's box he had opened by taking a cold, calculated political strategy and applying it in a political process with a party that had a long standing civil rights history, if you will, up to that point. So the reality began for us in that. And I and I'm not
disputing your point. I think you make a very valid point about the poison and the role that that poison played in the modern day Republican Party.
But I think it's
important to understand that art in the political calculations to it, that Nixon took advantage of coming off of that horrible convention speech of Goldwater in 64 where he embraced segregation ism. Nixon saw the political opportunism of that in winning his presidential race in 68, and even Reagan played into it when he launched his campaign in 1980 in one of the ugliest spots in Mississippi relative to the question of race. So, yeah,
that narrative is there for sure. But that does not mean that there were people inside the party who fought against that narrative as well.
¶ All About the Voters
Michael, are the voters a reflection of the Republican Party or is the Republican Party a reflection of the voters?
Both. Both. It's symbiotic. I mean, you see it on you see it on the left as much as you see it on the right. You have a situation where over the last 30 or so years, the base of of staying with the Republican Party, the base of the party, has become much more animated, engaged. And why is that?
Because that base has felt more and more disenfranchised, disconnected, which allowed that space for Donald Trump to come in and play the kind of narrative out that he played out, keeping in mind that what Donald Trump did was effectively take his viewers over a 14, 15 year period and turn them into his voters. They so he had already been talking to a lot of those folks out there
through the various media outlets. That he was on where he connected with these voters, which is why the overwhelming thing you hear about Donald Trump from a lot of his supporters is he's a fighter. It's not about policy. It's not about these other things. So I think you look more broadly
at where the
line is between the voters and the party. And it's a story of the tail getting to the point where it wags the dog. And I think that's what drives a lot of it right now.
¶ Break 1
A moment of your time, a new podcast from Kerkow Media. Currently 21 years old and today, like magic, extended from her fingertips down to the blood to take care of
yourself because the world needs you and you meet
every do gooder that asked about me was ready to spit on my dream fingers
who were facing you can feel like your purpose in your worth is really being done to stop me from playing the piano. She buys walkie talkies, wonders to whom she should give the second. Don't love
humans. We never did.
We never. Well, we just find the beauty of
rock climbing is that you can only focus on what's right in life and so are American life begins.
We may need to stay apart, but let's create together available on all podcast platforms. Submit your piece by Kerkow Dotcom. Slash a moment of your time.
Let's talk about today's reality, Michael, for just a second,
¶ The Radicalization of the Republicans
because it seems that any Republican now that has a conscience or says anything responsible gets run out of town on a rail. Where did these voters come from and how did they get so radicalized?
They've been radicalized over a long period of time. It just didn't happen in four years or in one political cycle. You had Tea Party before that. You had a lot of disaffected voters in the 2006 election, the 2000 election. You had a lot of frustrated voters in the 1990s and 80s. And so this is this is a trend line that's been in place for a long time in a lot of those voters check themselves out of the system. They just stop participating, which was the big surprise of
twenty sixteen when they finally showed back up. And all these voters who no one was counting on, no one was polling, no one was talking to folks discounted because of their God and their guns or they discounted them because they were somehow bad people or are not serious or smart or anything like that. They decided to show
up and vote. Their avatar was Donald Trump. So you've got to look at how these voters, particularly on the Republican side, and I would dare say currently on the on the Democratic side, you have the same issue with progressives who've emerged as a as a fighting force inside the Democratic Party. And if you don't learn the lesson from the GOP, you are doomed to make the same mistakes that were made inside the GOP with respect to
that very hard conservative base. And so while the Republican side is more about the culture wars, the Democratic side is more about the economic wars. And so those are competing interests in this voter narrative that I think voters who feel isolated are looking for avatars, looking for voices, looking for leaders who reflect that. That's how you come up with the Marjorie Taylor Green. That's how you come
up with a crazy gates down in Florida. So the realities are where those voters now are selecting people who they think can push back and attack the system that they've come to dislike. That's one of the animating ideas around Donald Trump and Trump ism, is to, as he said he would do, deconstruct the administrative state.
¶ The Republican Game plan
Michael, I think you make really good points and you talk about the willingness to fight, to change, to bring the Republican Party back to its original ideals. But when you talk about the frustration of these voters, part of it is that
the Republicans
courted the white working class. Sure. But they courted them on false promises. Their policies really benefited the wealthy and corporations. The policies that no government, no taxes, no regulation, all
government is bad.
And then when the Republican Party didn't deliver on that, their base got more frustrated. It was the Republican base that became the Tea Party after George W. Bush
and then the
conservative money embraced the Tea Party, and it just kept getting spiraled into more and more extremism. And part of that, as you know, was promoted by lies. The Republican Party told their base, not just the big lie last time.
All right.
So you say all of that. So what do you what do you want to do about it? What do you think you do about it? Let me throw the question to you, because, you know, the question is, what are you fighting over? I can fight the past and yeah, I can list the sins of the father and the grandfather and the great grandfather, but I don't live in that time. So the question is, what do I do with that? I cannot only thing I can do is
acknowledge the truth of it. When I was national chairman, I gave a speech at the National Press Club, which I definitely declared that the efforts by the party to engage in the Southern Strategy was over. The Southern Strategy was dead. I took that speech and went to the NAACP and declared without hesitation that we are broadening the base of our party and we need you to be a part of that. Ken Mehlman did the same thing. He was the first one to acknowledge the sins of
the father and the grandfather. So the question then becomes in this internal struggle inside of a party in which people seem to be more interested in crouching in a corner and looking out at the world and saying, you are against us and therefore we are against you, as opposed to recognizing the lie of that. How did you then help them out of that corner? How do you then move that party for. And that is to be honest, Jane, that is the real battle that's occurring there. Republicans right
now who are just saying, I'm out of here. I don't want any part of it. This thing is dead to me. I'm going to go start a third party. I'm going to do something else. Then there are other Republicans are like, well, OK, that may or may not be true. We'll see. And then there guys like myself, like I'm already to do something else, but I think I want to try to terraform this first. I'm going to try to bring. Many of those folks who still believe in those ideas, I don't need the majority of
Greens in my party, I want them gone. I want them in the wasteland of politics, on the ash heap of history. I don't need them. We don't need them as a country. So the question is, how do you then pull people away from that? Someone's got to take a stand and someone's got to say this is worth fighting for. And if they don't, then basically what you're saying is, screw it, the GOP will go the way of the Whigs and whatever shows up next will show
up next. And we'll just live with what Democrats give us for the next however many years. I'm not willing to settle on that at this point.
¶ A Huge Task to Change the Party
I agree that's a huge task to try to take this party from where it has gotten itself and try to basically fight for the heart and soul of the of the Republican Party. Yeah, I think you really have to start with how human beings change. I think you also you have to be willing to take an honest look at yourself and
say, where did I
get it wrong? And then learn and grow from that. Sure. So that starts with the leaders of the Republican Party as many as possible, starting to tell the truth, not talking about confessing of sins, but the truth about what the situation is today. Right.
¶ Republicans are not leading
Jane, the politicians in the Republican Party are reacting to what brings in their voters.
That's it.
They're not
governing.
They're not governing or leaving.
They're not leading anything. They are, in fact, politicians. So why should they change their direction if what they're doing is giving them a situation where they're winning?
But I'm talking about telling the truth, I'm not talking about confessing sense,
but you would like them to tell the truth, but the truth didn't necessarily work, right? The lies have worked.
If the truth doesn't win you an election. Why would I tell it? I mean, let me take let me tell you what the thinking is right now, Jane. Mm hmm. The thinking inside the GOP right now is and this is reflected by Mitch McConnell, if you want to get a bead on what's going on, just listen to what the man's telling you. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So Mitch McConnell has already calculated and what he's saying is evidence that suggests to him, sorry, we get the house back
next year, we'll just hold this line. Our voters are going to be fired up to to take back the House next year and we'll grab the Senate along the way. Now that the political realities of that may be very different a year from now than they are presently. But that's the calculation. And I think, Bill, you make the right point. Where is the incentive to acknowledge the truth? We've watched the president in the former United States crap all over the truth for five years. What price to
be paid for it? Oh, he got impeached twice.
So what I'm going to take a right turn for
¶ The Insurrection
a second. January six was a big day, Michael. If the folks who broke into the Capitol on January 6th were handed the keys to the government other than to anoint Trump back in power, what do they want? What would they do if they were in charge?
That's a hard question, because I don't think they know what they would do. They could because they were they were they were rudderless. They had a command. They had they were on a ship with no rudder. They had a they had a captain of the ship, President Trump, who was just saying this way with no idea what what it would look like when they got to where this was. So outside of wanting to to kill the vice president and the speaker of the House, I don't think there was much more of a plan.
There wasn't.
And so what does that mean for Jane as a white woman? What does that mean for me as a black man? I would say, are you with some of these people's are our fates would have been a little bit suspect in the hands of some of these people. That's the reality. They are threatened by the success and the power of a woman like Jane and what she's done in her career professionally and personally. They're threatened by what I stand for. And what I've done in mine is as a black man, they see in America that
never existed. And Trump alludes to that all the time.
You don't think they're just voting their tax rate? No.
Oh, no, bill. Not not the ones that stormed the capital. There's other people that do, but not the ones that stormed the Capitol.
No, they're not voting tax rates now.
Do they believe the election was really stolen?
Yes.
Yes, they do. They were told
that by a guy six months before he was not elected. Correct. He said if I lose, it's because it's it's a fraud.
And so that tells you that they were more invested in him than they were the country. And that should be scary to all of us. And a lesson to all of us. Right.
¶ Lies
I think a lot of what is going on in America right now is based on a lot of leaders lying and a lot of media lies going on. And we won't talk about which stations do it in which stations don't. Truth is powerful.
The truth is powerful.
Speaking about the lies, let's talk about some of the things that are going on right now, like the fundraising. I know, Michael, you've heard about how the Republicans have had to return something like 120
million dollars after
tricking their own base with a hidden opt out that made their contributions auto repeat monthly. It's like thank you for your support. And, you know, I'm not going to say what it really is.
It's stupid. The grift is amazing.
Yeah. And that's what
the party is becoming. This goes back to the 2000 election. But go ahead.
It's just I don't understand how this group of people can be so forgiving. You know, a tablespoon of bleach will keep covid away. It's like there is no end to their tolerance for how much they can get screwed by the party that they're voting into power.
They don't see it that way. You do. You're not looking at this through their lens. You have your belief system in the way you've approached this. You've not walked in their shoes. You've not spent time in a conversation with them. When I have and this is what triggered for me the moment. And I knew at this point in
twenty sixteen,
early twenty sixteen that Donald Trump was going to win the election. I'm watching a focus group and this young mother of two divorced from New Hampshire, I believe she was when asked what she liked about Donald Trump, she said, well, he's just like me. And I sat there and I went, Oh, I need to peel that onion back. Yeah, I need
to understand that because you need to tell me. This woman, this blue collar woman raising two kids on her own, looks at someone like Donald Trump and says he's just like me, is not like, oh, I just like him
or he makes me
feel good. She said he's just like me. And I'm like, OK, there's something going on out here. So, Bill, you've got to you've got to understand how people look at this and why they look at this and why they still look at Trump the way they do, why all those people were willing to go and commit insurrection in his name and then come out of the other again. Oh, no, no. Most of the people there, they were killed. They were kuhnen.
They were antifa. Oh, you mean your buddy who drove across the country with you in your pickup truck, those antifa you drove with an empty fat guy all that way from from Mississippi or from Missouri or North Dakota. And but they're willing to rewrite the narrative to protect what they perceive as the important interest they have at the moment. And that's their investment in everything that Donald Trump has said.
¶ Break 2
On medicine, we're still practicing join Dr. Stephen Tayback and Bill Kurtis for real conversations with the medical professionals who have their finger on the pulse of health care in the modern world available on all your favorite podcasting platforms produced by Kerkow media.
Welcome back, Michael, you came out in 2020 in support
¶ The Biden Plan
of Biden and Harris. How are they doing in their administration so far?
I think they're doing amazingly well. And to be honest, I disagree with the president's decision on XL pipeline. I thought that was a mistake because of the impact they would have on on the markets and jobs especially. But that's OK. That's a policy disagreement. I knew that I even told the president during this campaign that I would disagree with him on these things and I would be vocal about that when necessary. And he was fine with that.
And so I think when I step back and I look at what he's done and the way he's doing it, I have to give him the same approval and applause that the American people are giving. He has stepped into the breach, turned around the narrative on COGAT, turned around
the narrative on the economy, turned around the narrative on. Now, as we move into the discussion on infrastructure, on job creation, winning the support of the American people by being transparent, I think very much to to Jane's earlier points about honesty, being honest, being vulnerable and willing to say, yeah, you know, we were caught flat footed at the border. While I appreciate that honesty. The next thing is now you've got to step up the game and come up with a
policy to address the crisis that is brewing there. Mm hmm. But I think the American people, at least at this point in the remaining days left leading up to his first 100 days, are willing to give him the runway to do that. And I think that's a particularly after what we've gone through, Bill, over
the last four years,
five years. I think that's a good thing. I think it's a healthy thing for both his administration and the country.
So let's talk about a couple of these policies. And I'd like to to start with the whole H.R. one discussion in Washington.
Right.
It does appear that the Republicans philosophy is do whatever you can to win voters, suppress fine gerrymander, change the look and feel of the local voters so that you can win. Fine. Lie fine. The Biden administration is butting up against that philosophy. So let's first talk about in this Congress, especially with the Senate, in the condition that it's in with the filibuster still alive, how do you navigate from here to, you know, maybe getting H.R.
one passed, making sure
that the voter has a say as opposed to they have no way to vote under the circumstances?
Yeah. So H.R. one is more than just voting no. And that's the problem with H.R. one. If I were the leadership, what I would do at this point is I would pull the voting provisions out as a standalone and put that package before the Congress. Now, you put the Republicans in a spot because it's easy for me to go back and criticize H.R. one by saying it does all these other things that we can't afford and it has nothing to do with voting. You know, the environmental provisions
in there, all the
sort of Christmas tree stuff that, you know, we tend to do as as a Democratic member of the House said, yeah, the problem with anything that's that's labeled H.R. one is that it just becomes a stalking horse for people to attack and because it's loaded up with everything.
What about gerrymandering and campaign finance?
How do you think the Democrats control the House of Representatives? That's been a part of the national platform for a long
time,
but at least the Democrats are willing to at least
reform it now. Yeah, and that's fine.
Then put it in a separate bill.
You think you could get it passed? Probably not. Why?
Well, the same reason you can't get responsible gun legislation passed.
Where is the will for the will
with the voters there? But the will with the politicians that are supported by the NRA is not. And who
do the voters
vote for? You think that
¶ Guns
the politicians right now on gun rules are reflecting the voters?
Let me ask you this
one with Sandy Hook. When did when do
we watch twenty six little babies get shot up in their classrooms? What year was that and how many elections have we had since then? And this is a 90 percent issue with the American people.
It becomes a chicken and egg because to the extent you have gerrymandered districts.
No, it doesn't. It does.
So what's the answer to that?
Might you vote
them out
if it's harder with gerrymandered districts? And I'm not talking about let's not talk about the past, as you say. Let's talk about how do you fix it today?
Actually, you know what, Jane? He's right. You have
said elections
have consequences. This is one of the consequences.
Yes, I understand that.
Whether the gerrymandered or not. Ninety seven percent of the members of Congress get re-elected, that's Democrats and Republicans. So at the end of the day, if these issues are that important to us as citizens, as voters, why do we keep electing individuals who don't support us on those? The issues we keep reelecting them, and irrespective you're now into the second gerrymandering, the second redistricting period, we're in twenty twenty that occurred during the period twenty ten to
twenty twenty. So you can change that. I know that firsthand because I live in a state where I'm outnumbered two to one by Democrats. All right. But I fought to change the system in my state to give to give single member districts to black voters who are being represented by white politicians and to give Republicans a little bit more opportunity to compete. I live in a county of eight hundred thousand people in which they're only registered.
Fifty some thousand Republicans. So don't talk to me about the impact of gerrymandering. I know that firsthand.
¶ Gerrymandering
And I'm not talking about gerrymandering from a party perspective. I'm just talking about in general. There are better ways of doing it.
But my point is the people support it as much as they complain about it, they still support it. And so you can't tell me that just because a district is gerrymandered a certain way that you have to keep voting for the same people who keep that system in place. Why not vote for the guy or gal who's running against it? Why not vote for the person who's coming out fresh out of the gate as opposed to the guy who's been a part of the problem for 30 years?
¶ Hope for the Republican Party?
Michael, I just want to ask you
one more question. Yes, sir.
Tell us something we don't know that can give us hope that the Republican Party can get back to governance, get away from politics and actually care about the American people are processed in our lives.
I can't tell you that because I don't know that. And that's what I'm still trying to discover if that light is even there. I'm just being honest. I think everybody wants very quick, easy solutions to an intractable, difficult problem that has been in the making. As Jane first noted in our conversation going back to the 1960s. And I just don't think you can just unwrap
that and
undo the devastating impact from that in a short time. It's going to take a leadership that has not emerged. I was heartened and hopeful with the likes of Liz Cheney doing what she did and Adam Kinzinger and others, you know, those 10 or so who who kind of stood their ground and who are now paying a political price for it. But we need more.
So, Michael, what's your place in this going forward
to make as much annoying noise as I can? People ask me why I haven't left the Republican Party. I said because it pisses them off. The longer I stay in, that's where I am today. In six months, we may be having a very different conversation if I see that light my coming on.
How can people follow you?
Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Michael Steele. Very easy. Check out my podcast, the Michael Steele podcast. You know, where we get your podcast there. I will be. And if you want to, you know, do a little deeper dive, you can go visit my website. Michael Steele Network dot com.
That's it. Oh, this was great.
Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation. I love the push. The pull. It's good to engage. And I wish as a country we did more of this with a sense of good nature and really with a sense of learning and hearing what the other person has said. And I thank you
both for that. And really, we enjoyed it.
Well, that was a powerful show, and I certainly hope Michael comes back and joins us. And Jane, of course, thank you for joining again. That was excellent. And to you listening, please don't forget the hit the follow button so you you don't have to hunt around for the
next episode of Meet Me in the Middle. And thank you to our producer and editor, Joey Salvinia, music for Meet Me in the Middle of a composed and performed by Celeste Anorectic, executive producer for this episode is Stuart Halpern. These are complicated issues. This is why we need to have a discussion like this in the middle. See you next week, everybody.
From Kerkow media media for your mind.