Rush Limbaugh, Michael Steele and the Other Bickering Boys Must Grow Up

The last time the Republicans were shut out of the House, the Senate, and the White House all at the same time was 1994. I worked at the Republican National Committee back then, when Haley Barbour, now governor of Mississippi, was chairman of the Republican Party. Fundraising was up, the "message of the day" imposed policy discipline, and we had a stable of Republican governors we relied on to spread our message. They were chief executives like Christie Whitman in New Jersey, Pete Wilson in California, Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, and Jim Edgar in Illinois.

Mary Kate Cary

By the end of that year, the Contract With America became the rallying cry of the House Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, and 40 years as the minority party came to a screeching halt. Barbour talked incessantly about the Republican Party as the "Big Tent," and, as a result, we kept a daily count of the "party switchers" who were jumping over from the Dems.

With Barbour in charge, the national committee was a well-oiled machine. Contrast that with today's national committee. New chairman and relative unknown Michael Steele pulled a Ronald Reagan and fired all the air traffic controllers—in this case, the entire RNC staff—but then, unlike Reagan, he neglected to hire any replacements. According to Politico, Steele and two consultants are working alone out of the fourth floor of RNC headquarters. They still haven't hired senior fundraising or policy staff. It's just Chairman Steele, apparently agreeing to every interview request he gets. He appears to be flying solo without air traffic control, saying things like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal—to whom he had just given "some slum love"—was "friggin' awesome," that he would favor more outreach to "urban-suburban hip-hop settings" as part of an "off the hook" PR campaign, and that civil unions are "crazy." According to news reports, "he even threw a shout-out to 'one-armed midgets.'" He's giving Vice President Joe Biden a run for his money as a one-man gaffe machine.

So it's no surprise that he got into it with talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, calling El Rushbo's show "ugly" and "incendiary" after the self-proclaimed Man With Talent on Loan From God said of President Obama: "I hope he fails." Everyone in Washington wants the economy to recover, and it's fine for the loyal opposition to say its means are a better way to achieve that end. You always want your policies to be proved right in the end and, by default, for the other side's not to succeed. (How many times have congressmen declared the other party's spending bills, for example, "dead on arrival"? That's not hoping the opposition will fail; that's declaring it a fact.) But when it comes to human suffering—such as that caused by war or economic calamity--you don't want anyone's policies not to succeed. That's the exception.

The problem is, Limbaugh didn't make that exception.

He said what he said because he can. It works when you have a radio show and millions of people love you or love to hate you. But, as conservative writer David Frum pointed out, it doesn't work when you are the Republican Party trying to win back voters in the middle.

So other party leaders stepped in alongside Steele to criticize Limbaugh's comments—but then quickly apologized to the talk show host. Others took shots on the pages of the Washington Post but then asked that their names not be used out of fear of the repercussions. The sight of so many otherwise intelligent men groveling before Rush was too much. The Democrats saw an opening and set up a website, ImSorryRush.com, for any other Republicans who want to play into Obama's hands. The White House reportedly actually has a senior aide tasked with guiding the Limbaugh strategy. But really, when Paul Begala declared, "Rush is the bloated face and drug-addled voice of the Republican Party," he went too far. So much for "change," post-partisanship, and an end to the politics of personal destruction. Back to mudslinging.

Have you noticed that as the rhetoric is ratcheted up by the men, the silence from the women is deafening? There's a reason you're not hearing from any women on this—not Hillary Clinton, not Kay Bailey Hutchison, not Olympia Snowe. The women are staying out of it because most women don't listen to Rush Limbaugh (the latest from Pew Research shows 72 percent of his listeners are men), and many have never heard of Michael Steele (my mother-in-law recently said, "Remind me again who he is"). It's a guy thing. And all the men are in this case behaving like children.