There has been a good deal of discussion about Michael Steele’s election as RNC Chairman. Even though this is a job he actively sought, I have to say I feel sorry for the man. Supposing for a moment that he proved to be as effective in his role as Howard Dean has been at the DNC, Steele is faced with an electorate so much more hostile to his party that his task is the thankless one of a coach who labors in obscurity rebuilding an absolutely decimated and humiliated franchise. Jim Schwartz, the unfortunate new head coach of the Detroit Lions, comes to mind as an example of what I mean. It is not going to be Schwartz’s fault that the Lions will continue to be terrible for the next several years; the flaws of the organization and the legacy of years of poor management would drag down the most successful and talented of coaches. Schwartz is by all accounts an excellent defensive coordinator, and the Titans’ defense has been outstanding during his tenure, but he is not a magician. Steele reportedly has been successful as a political operator, albeit not as a candidate, which is how he has maneuvered himself into the current position, so one imagines that he has some instincts for political tactics that may prove valuable. Regardless, his talent is not going to be all that important. The flaws of the party and the legacy of the last eight years will drag Steele down despite his best efforts, at which time everyone will hold forth on what it means that Steele, who we will continually be reminded is the GOP’s first black chairman, “failed” to work miracles. Like Schwartz, he is inheriting a team that has little talent. Unlike Schwartz, he isn’t going to get the opportunity to recruit the best new talent, because these are the people (i.e., degree-holding and young voters) who are fleeing from the GOP the fastest. Among these groups of voters, it is more and more as if the GOP held a draft and no one bothered to enter.

Curious to see what Steele had to say, I watched the interview he gave on FoxNews, and I can’t say I was all that impressed. To what did he attribute the GOP’s political decline over the last two cycles? Naturally, it was spending. That was it. Spending. It’s not just that he didn’t address the GOP’s failures in foreign policy and its errors in anti-terrorism, which I would have been interested to hear, but that this was the only reason he gave, which suggests that he thinks the main solution to GOP woes is to come out against spending (unless, of course, it relates to “defense”).

Steele refers to Republicans’ “value for a sound economy,” and this did not seem to be a joke. He said quite seriously that the election results had nothing to do with “our value for a sound economy.” I don’t know quite how to take that claim. One wonders where this “value” was over the last few years–no doubt being inflated by loose monetary policy along with the housing market. Then, when asked for a new idea, Steele invoked school choice! I can’t really blame Steele. He has become the national chairman of a party whose Congressional leadership has believed for years that the only thing it ever did wrong was to vote for too much spending, and he has become the public face of the GOP at a time when it has zero fresh ideas, which is why he had to keep returning to lines referring back to debates from the ’90s that could have been delivered in the ’90s without changing a syllable. The problem is not so much that Steele’s answers lack imagination, but that if he had shown an inkling of imagination much of his party probably would turn on him.