Steele told the conservative Washington Times, “We need messengers to really capture that region - young, Hispanic, black, a cross section ... We want to convey that the modern-day GOP looks like the conservative party that stands on principles. But we want to apply them to urban-surburban [sic] hip-hop settings.” This new approach "will be avant garde, technically...It will come to table with things that will surprise everyone - off the hook.” I think he means to say that the approach will be off the hook not that it "will surprise everyone - off the hook" but some points for effort. Also based on the little information we have I think what he's talking about will be a bit more off the chain than off the hook but that's just quibbling really.
As the above video, which I had somehow forgotten about, reminds us, when the GOP attempts to make contact with hip-hop culture things do not always go so well (it's really worth it to watch MC Rove at work, even if you've seen it before). Of course it can be fun to mock these sort of ham-fisted efforts at racial outreach, but I do think Steele's comments point to a larger problem for his party which is somewhat related to points I made in an earlier post.
When it comes to appealing to "minority" voters (which basically means blacks and Latinos) there are largely two schools of thought among Republicans: 1) There's basically no way for us to do this without changing our core beliefs so we shouldn't really worry about it; 2) We can reach out to blacks and Hispanics with some clever marketing and imagery and by emphasizing the one or two issues where we might gain some traction ("family values," school vouchers—I think that's actually about it). Obviously Steele seems to fall into the latter camp.
There's something vaguely laudable in the idea that the GOP needs to reach out to non-white groups and individuals, but few in the party ever seem willing to do so in a more than cursory manner. George W. Bush gave Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice top posts, and no doubt Michael Powell will soon be making appearances with Daddy Yankee and some as yet unknown rapper who really hates paying his taxes (I think Sir Don't-Tax-Me-A-Lot is clunky enough to work). But those kind of superficial efforts are obviously not sufficient (and can backfire pretty severely).
Aside from all of the substantive differences between the GOP and significant majorities of African Americans and Latinos when it comes to policy, the fact is that the GOP is—more than ever—the party of white Southerners, a significant portion of whom retain less-than-Dr. Kingish views of race relations in this country. Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Republicans have used coded and even overt racial appeals to lower and middle class white folks (Southerners but certainly folks in other regions as well), and as a result the party has a significant number of supporters and even leaders who do and say ridiculously racist things.
The vitriol expressed against Barack Obama at McCain/Palin rallies is a primary example of this phenomenon. I would guess that for many black voters, it's difficult to imagine being a member of a political party that has scads of supporters who believed the first African American presidential candidate was a Muslim terrorist who wanted to mess up things for white people and change 1600 Pennsylvania to the "Black House" (it was amazing how often that last idea came up). Speaking the language of hip-hop and other urban cultures—even fluently, which I doubt Michael Steele does—will not get rid of this problem.
In a sense there is a cancer at the center of the Republican Party (which used to be at the center of the Democratic party) that relates to race and which makes cross racial appeals exceedingly difficult. It's rather hard to reach out to Latino and African American voters when you have Tom Tancredo and Chip Saltsman running around, and even the kind of cosmetic marketing campaign efforts that Steele seems to be proposing risk alienating your white conservative base (some of the comments at this Free Republic thread are interesting in the latter respect).
The main problem as I see it for Republicans in the years to come is that the party base beyond which they must expand is itself a significant obstacle to any expansion. I don't think there's any easy way to finesse that. Electing Steele to head the party rather than the runner up (who belonged to an all-white country club until a few months ago) was a good move, but it does little to address the core problem, and neither will Steele's new strategy. As the mighty Mos Def reminded us 10 years ago:
Hip Hop will simply amaze you
Craze you, pay you
Do whatever you say do
But black, it can't save you
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