The Bridge of Steele keeps tumbling down

Marc Fisher takes his turn at pummeling Michael Steele:

The Iraq war "didn't work." The Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina was "a monumental failure." Republicans in Congress have "lost our way."

Imagine the impact those comments would have made on Maryland's Senate race if Lt. Gov. Michael Steele had stood up in front of the cameras and presented himself as an independent Republican, someone who would go to Washington with his own ideas and the courage to go his own way.

Delivered straight up, Steele's remarks probably would have propelled him into the lead in the race to succeed retiring Sen. Paul Sarbanes.

Instead, Steele made his move to distance himself from his party -- after all, he's running in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1 -- in a setting that reeks of politics as usual: a no-names, just-us-elite-insiders lunch with reporters in the back room of Charlie Palmer's steakhouse at the foot of Capitol Hill.

[snip]

The Michael Steele who hangs out in Capitol Hill steakhouses is apparently a near Democrat who wants Marylanders to see him as the one candidate for Senate who will stand up to party leadership and connect with the pains and dreams of ordinary people. This Steele sounds so much like his opponents that I began to wonder -- job-sharing, anyone?

But the Steele who retreats to the comfort of WBAL wraps himself in a good old Republican cloth coat. "I've been quoted as calling the president my homeboy," Steele said on the radio yesterday, "and that's how I feel."

So much for independence.

So much for his candidacy.

Meanwhile, Bruce Godfrey is on to something when he says that Kweisi Mfume will be the primary beneficiary of Steele's gaffes, in that white liberals worried that Mfume won't be competitive in the general will now see that Steele, judging by his current behavior, is going to lose no matter what, so they can vote their consciences. But my concern about Mfume, I think, is still valid: that white moderates will abandon Mfume for the more "respectable" Steele, no matter how amateurish the latter's campaign may be.