RNC's Steele: Is Speaking Ability Guarantee Enough?

Seems in my early Friday blog on new RNC Chairman Michael Steele I just got under the wire to be able to say:

But before attention shifts to watching if Steele behaves like a typical black politician with access to spoils, let us consider why Steele won, and why it is a disaster.

Steele's Campaign Spending Questioned By Henri E. Cauvin The Washington Post Saturday February 7 2009 reports allegations by a convicted felon who just happened to have been finance chairman of Steele’s 2006 MD Senate Campaign. That sourcing, as Steele’s defenders rightly say, taints the allegations, but the last paragraph of the Post’s story is discomforting:

Over the years, money trouble has been a persistent problem for Steele. His first race for public office, a 1998 bid for the Republican nomination for state comptroller, ended nearly $35,000 in debt, much of it to his sister. He was fined twice by state officials for missing deadlines to file campaign finance reports and was in debt and had faced foreclosure in 2001...The state party threw Steele a financial lifeline, awarding him an unusual $30,000 consulting contract.

Turning to (hopefully) more important issues, Tom Sowell has a column showing uncharacteristic enthusiasm for Steel, on the perfectly sound grounds that he can actually speak:

Thomas Sowell: Forget race; Republicans need Steele NorwichBullein.com Feb 06 2009

A huge and perennial handicap for Republicans is they seldom have anybody who can articulate their case to the public. It’s hard to win with candidates such as Bob Dole and John McCain.

That’s why Gov. Sarah Palin was such a sensation in arousing the grassroots. She could talk!

This is absolutely true. And Steele appears to be a wordsmith. Is that comforting enough?

In a word, no. High verbal fluency is often found amongst Blacks, from street Rappers to Martin Luther King. It can lead whites into serious misjudgments. As J. Philippe Rushton wrote for us some years ago:

...African Americans—display high levels of social competence. They are outgoing, talkative, sociable, warm, and friendly. Psychometrically speaking, they score high on the Extraversion personality dimension. They are also …low in the Neuroticism dimension. This combination of high Extraversion and low Neuroticism results in a socially dominant personality profile….Blacks have a self-assured "bright" talkative, personality, which leads many people to over-estimate their abstract reasoning ability.

Like any other group, Whites look upon themselves as the norm. Whites tend not to speak up if they don’t know the answer to a question. Nor do they like to intrude on the privacy of others. They erroneously assume that, because Africans are talkative, they must know what they are talking about.

The RNC problem, I fear, is not that Steele is dimmer than his elected peers – most office holders in my experience are quite dim or, perhaps, very lazy intellectually. The problem to be feared is the MLK one – verbal fluency does not preclude remarkable social depravity, more so than with whites. Putting aside the sad case of Obama prototype Rhodes Scholar ex-Congressman Mel Reynolds, let us consider Obama’s former Pastor, the Reverend Dr Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Steve Sailer devotes Chapter 9 of America’s Half Blood Prince to a definitive analysis of Wright and Obama’s relationship with him:

Senator and Mrs. Obama donated $53,770 from 2005-2007 to Trinity, (VDARE.com –Wright’s Church) helping propagate...racist paranoia. (AHBP P181).

Sailer respects Wright:

A well-read intellectual who has dipped deeply into the scholarly
work of leftist black theologians and philosophers. (AHBP P163)

and he clearly is a formidable wordsmith:

…Rev. God Damn America.
Wright is a master at distilling his meaning down to an agitating
phrase, such as “U.S. of K.K.K.” (AHBP P98)

“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away
more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a
year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in
one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere...(AHBP P183)

and of course one cannot forget his masterly crushing of Obama’s effort to lie away his relationship with Wright

If Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would not ever
get elected… Politicians say what they say and do what they
do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on
polls ... I do what pastors do; he does what politicians do.(AHBP,P186)

Unlike Steele (and Obama) Wright is has demonstrated considerable executive ability –in the building of his large congregation.

But he is not a respectable man

the 66-year-old Porsche-driving pastor seems still
very much in his prime: he spent 2007 conducting a passionate
adulterous affair with Elizabeth Payne, a married white woman
three decades his junior who worked for one of his protégés at a
black Dallas megachurch. The New York Post reported in
September 2008:

Wright has been married to his second wife, Ramah, for more
than 20 years. The preacher reportedly wooed Ramah away
from her first husband in the 1980s, when the couple came to
marriage counseling at Wright�s Trinity United Church of Christ
in Chicago. (AHBP P170)

My prediction: before Steele’s term is out, the RINOs who foisted Steele on the Party will be seen to be the credulous fools they are.

This is a disaster for the GOP.

Read America's Half Blood Prince!