Michael Steele’s gaffe on abortion is garnering plenty of reaction. The biggest name to come out on this has been Mike Huckabee who at the HuckPAC blog came out with criticism and concern on Steele’s statement. Steele took a call from Huckabee and Huckabee wrote about the conversation on his blog:

Michael affirms his pro-life commitment, including support for the party platform of a Constitutional amendment to protect life and his conviction that life begins at conception.   The point he sought to make was that words like “choice” and “individual decisions” have been co-opted by the left, when in fact his mother made a choice as an individual—the CHOICE to give birth to him as an unmarried college student.  It would have been easy for her to have made a choice to end his life, but she chose life.

Obviously, this is an issue which is very important to me and to many other conservatives and it was important for me to get this clarified.  I’m grateful that Chairman Steele was willing to set the record straight without hesitation.

Even with Steele’s explanation to Huckabee, the effort seems weak and confusing. It also didn’t re-assure more than a few people in the comments section of Huckabee’s blog. Said one commenter, ” I will be willing to wait and see where this goes; but my confidence at this point is fairly low.”

The statement is problematic. As noted by James Richardson at Red State, this could hurt the party in the pocketbook:

The problem for Steele, then, is not the potential for expulsion from his current post, but rather the extent to which these highly-publicized gaffes will upset the party’s fundraising. His predecessor, Mike Duncan, earned a reputation as a prolific fundraiser; consequently committee members will expect similar results from a chairman whose celebrity easily dwarfs the camera-shy Duncan.

Steele’s comments on abortion, of which I add were the most confusing from the GQ interview, will squarely pit him against social conservative activists and donors. And as such, he’s playing fast and loose with the committee’s large and small dolor donor database. March 20th — the release of FEC fundraising reports — will likely be the first of many bad days in the Steele administration, especially if he intends to keep poking the base in the eye with sharp objects.

By way of offering advice to Chairman Steele, a fellow RNC veteran quips, “He should be like Obama and carry his teleprompters wherever he goes.”

For obvious racial reasons, parallels between President Barack Obama and Steele have been drawn many a time. A more honest depiction, perhaps, would be to that of his loquacious side kick, the wordiest man in Washington – Vice President Joe Biden.

Joe Biden–ouch.  Richardson does note that though the GQ interview was done 4 days before Steele picked a fight with Rush Limbaugh. Maybe he was just in a gaffetastic mood. Maybe we won’t see these gaffes in the future. But no less a blogger than the great Ed Morrissey who (to answer a question I was asked on a previous thread) works for neither Focus on the Family gives his view of Steele based on recent controversies:

However, the problem with Steele isn’t the GQ interview.  It’s the fact that he can’t seem to make up his mind and stick with it.  Steele seems to have environmentally-dependent political views.  When he’s talking with DL Hughley, the Republican Convention looks like a Nazi rally.  When he’s talking on TV, Rush Limbaugh is ugly and incendiary.  When Steele talks with GQ, he’s pro-choice.  And Steele reverses himself with amazing alacrity when speaking in entirely different environments.  He appears to have no convictions and no principles when he makes these gyrations on the national stage, as though he stands for nothing but Michael Steele and access to the media spotlight.

I have seen the man speak with conviction and passion at conservative events and leave everyone mightily impressed, but now we have to wonder whether Steele just tailored the message for the audience, as he appears to have done with Hughley and GQ.  I don’t necessarily buy that, as he has easier ways to get media air time than being in the Republican Party, but it’s hard not to ask the question these days.

One thing is certain: he’s a lot less media savvy than most of us thought.  And since he doesn’t seem to have much skill in organization, we have to ask ourselves why we should support his continued tenure as RNC chair.

Morrissey hits on something here. It was something that some picked up when he wavered on abortion in the 2006 Maryland U.S. Senate race. Perhaps, it’s a “conservative survival skill” in Maryland, to speak in and reinterpret liberal code words in an extreme liberal state, while taking conservative positions. Well, Chairman Steele, I don’t know about Conservatives in Maryland, but those of us in the other 49 States don’t have a copy of your code book. And done at a national level sends waves of confusion and discouragement rather than clarity through the Republican ranks.

This isn’t to say Steele doesn’t have his defenders: John Hawkins at Right Wing News warns us:

Liberals are going to try to destroy Michael Steele because if you’re not a straight, white male, they think they own you. If you are black, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, female, gay, etc., etc., and a Republican, they’re going to try to personally humiliate and destroy you for being a living, breathing refutation of the idea that women and minorities can only succeed with the help of the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, there’s something very different going on with conservatives. Over the last few years, the Right has been burned again and again by Republican politicians who claim to be conservative and then sell us down the river. Even John McCain, who spent eight years attacking and undermining conservatives on a regular basis, claimed to be a conservative when he ran for President.

Then, along comes Michael Steele. The knock on him was supposed to be that he wasn’t reliably conservative as some of the other candidates. Still, he seemed to get it and managed to take the RNC Chairmanship in a hard fought battle. Then, soon after, he blundered into a conflict with Rush Limbaugh (Plus, the Nazi comments he let pass). That was a doubly serious error on Steele’s part, not just because it was a big mistake, but because it played to type. Here’s the guy who people worried was “too moderate” taking shots at a conservative icon. So, people who weren’t sure about him in the first place made a judgment: this is proof the guy really isn’t a conservative. From there, they started looking for reasons to doubt him.

If you don’t believe that’s true, ask yourself: if Rush Limbaugh, Jim DeMint, Thomas Sowell, Rick Warren, Ann Coulter, etc., had made the exact same comments, would anyone have even raised an eyebrow? I think not.

Think some would have raised an eyebrow, but with someone who was an established conservative, there would be more of an attitude of, “I wonder what they meant by that.” rather than, “Oh my gosh, there we go again.”

There’s little doubt that Democrats want Steele to fail (don’t know if that makes them unpatriotic) and that his color is a part of that. But, the fact is Steele’s been providing them plenty of help and needs to get it in gear. Hawkins makes the point that Steele handled much of the rest of the GQ interview very well. That’s great and also completely irrelevant.

Those who will read the GQ interview amount to the 788,000 readers of Gentlemen’s Quarterly and let’s say half that many Steele Fans and political junkies. How many millions have heard about this latest occurence? This is a huge error and Steele needs to make a course correction in how he’s approaching answering tough issues, because these quotes are going to blow up and he takes over an organization that many conservatives don’t trust.