Slums Are For Lovers?
What on earth is this? Well, it is an interview between Michael Steele and ABC Radio’s Curtis Sliwa, but beyond that I don’t know how else to describe it:
SLIWA: Now, using a little bit of that street terminology, are you giving him [Jindal] any Slum love, Michael?
STEELE: (laughter)
SLIWA: Because he is — when guys look at him and young women look at him — they say oh, that’s the slumdog millionaire, governor. So, give me some slum love.
STEELE: I love it. (inaudible) … some slum love out to my buddy. Gov. Bobby Jindal is doing a friggin’ awesome job in his state. He’s really turned around on some core principles — like hey, government ought not be corrupt. The good stuff … the easy stuff.
Steele elaborates elsewhere on his efforts to make the GOP more hip-hop-friendly:
Curtis Sliwa: When you used the hip-hop vernacular, man, Barack Obama has bling bling in this stimulus package, you got people’s attention.
Michael Steele: Absolutely. There’s a lot of bling bling — the bling bling’s got bling bling in this package. That’s how bad it is.
There are no words sufficient to express my bewilderment.
In case you think Steele is just kidding around, here is more:
Curtis Sliwa: You ain’t ever gonna get Mitt Romney in a room with Ludacris high fiving over the RNC.
Michael Steele: Watch him, watch me. Look, I’ll never forget when I got Russell Simmons and former chairman Ed Gillespie in the same room in 2004. It can happen and it will happen. This party has got to take it’s head out of it’s you know what and recognize that America doesn’t look like America in 1952. That America now is something very different, very beautiful — that has a lot of strips and strains to it. But, it’s real and we’ve got to get in the real.
Of course, that calls to mind Romney’s, um, memorable moment when he asked a crowd of black kids in his well-meaning, ridiculous way, “Who let the dogs out?”
Update: Ta-Nehisi Coates asks Michael Steele to stop the madness. This brings up something else that I should have mentioned in the original post: what is Steele’s target audience when he talks like this? It can’t be American desis, that much is certain. I mean, Jindal’s mother is a Punjabi nuclear physicist, and he was a Rhodes scholar who studied at Oxford. No one would confuse him for someone who grew up in the slums of Mumbai. The success of Jindal’s parents and Jindal’s own success have nothing to do with the sort of random luck of Slumdog Millionaire‘s main character, but when presented with a chance to say that Steele opts to endorse this “slum love” nonsense. It’s bad enough when Republicans practice the phony populism of pretending to be a down-home country boy when they are, in fact, well-heeled lawyers and lobbyists who live at the Watergate, or when they valorize politicians for knowing less than they should, but are they so out of it that one of their leaders talks about one of their smartest, best-educated elected officials like this?
Second Update: More predictably, here is Coulter:
Wasn’t Bobby great in “Slumdog Millionaire”?
Kya bakwas!
Painful. Painful. Like watching someone saw a tree limb off behind himself. Or someone on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
It almost seems like a put up job. Of course, if you “diss” Curtis Sliwa, you’ll get the talk radio dittoheads attacking you that you’re taking on the only people “fightin’ for ‘Merica.”
Kill me now.
A similar thing happened to the Conservative Party in 1997, after they were humiliatingly defeated by Labour. William Hague attempted a few public relations stunts to show that Conservatives actually could be hip, but the more he tried to demonstrate it, the more it demonstrated how remarkably un-hip the Conservative Party actually was. No doubt the same thing will happen with the GOP in the next election cycle; if it means anything, it means that right now the GOP is dangerously close to–if not already in–the doldrums and will only be jolted back out by Democratic failure. That’s how you know when a party is permanently impoverished in spirit, though not necessarily quantity: When they have to rely on the failures of their opponents to deliver them victory.
Well, we can always hope the fraud investigation against Steele has something to it.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad………. I’m not sure whether this was more bizarre than that clip making the round of Bolton hoping Obama’s home town, that would be Chicago, gets nuked and everyone roaring with laughter and clapping.