A horse of a different color: Maryland's Michael Steele and the courage of the black Republican.

As a black Republican, Michael Steele is used to taunts and attacks. Over the years, he has developed skin that is not only black but thick as well. "I'm not an elephant for nothing," he notes. Steele, the lieutenant governor of Maryland, will need that elephant's skin for the campaign he has just launched. He's running for the U.S. Senate, hoping to succeed Democrat Paul Sarbanes, who is retiring after five terms.

On the day he announced his Senate candidacy, all hell broke loose. Steve Gilliard is a popular blogger in New York, running a left-wing site called The News Blog. He ran a doctored photo of Steele, depicting him as a hideous minstrel. The caption underneath said, "I's Simple Sambo and I's running for the Big House." Nice, huh? But hardly novel for Mike Steele. When he ran for lieutenant governor in 2002, he was pelted with Oreo cookies. (Get it? Black on the outside, white on the inside.) The president of the state senate, Thomas V. "Mike" Miller--white, as it happens--called him "the personification of an Uncle Tom." (He later apologized.) The Baltimore Sun, in an infamous editorial, said, "[Steele] brings little to the team but the color of his skin."

What triggered the most recent rage over Steele was, first, the fact of his running for the U.S. Senate, and, second, a restoking of the Elkridge Country Club controversy. The Elkridge Country Club? You'll find it in greater Baltimore, and the governor of Maryland, Robert Ehrlich, held a fundraiser there in June. At the time, the club had no black members. It does now--in part, one may presume, because Ehrlich, Steele, and other influential figures asked the club to get with it.

Today, Ehrlich explains that he holds fundraisers all over the state, including at golf clubs, and he has not been in the habit of scrutinizing membership lists, or inquiring about race. What he inquires about is price: He's interested in the lowest costs on, for example, greens fees and food. At Elkridge, he and his supporters played 18 holes of golf and had a cookout. Those supporters included people of all races. Besides which, Maryland politicos and their like hold events at Elkridge all the time--we're talking about big Democrats, liberal newspaper execs, the teachers' association. (Me: "Not a lot of Republicans in that group, I imagine." Governor: "None.")

Mike Steele says that, when the press asked him about Elkridge last summer, he had just come out of a meeting on education--chiefly the education of poor blacks. And he responded that he had a hard time worrying about country-club admission when black Marylanders were in no position, financially, to join such an institution anyway. Where were our priorities? "That got played as flippant," he says--but he is far from blase about discrimination. "I remember that I took my great-aunt in 1982 to her place of employment: a country club in South Carolina. 1 had to drop her off at the back door, because she couldn't enter through the front door. And as I was leaving, I saw a sign out front that said, 'For Whites Only.' This was in 1982! If someone wants to paint me as ignorant ... Look, I know what my experience has been."

When Steele was attacked as Simple Sambo, some Maryland Democrats applauded, some kept mum, and others expressed disapproval. A legislator named Salima Marriott was not among the disapproving. "Because he is a conservative," she told the Washington Times, "he is different than most public blacks [true], and he is different than most people in our community [debatable]. His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people." But Democrats running for their party's Senate nomination did better, at least after a day or two. One of them, Kweisi Mfume--the former congressman and the former president of the NAACP--had the grace to say, "Black bigotry can be just as cruel and evil as white bigotry. There are too many bigots in too many places."

Governor Ehrlich says that, as soon as Steele announced, "the Democrats reverted to form." Certainly a great many of them did, in Maryland and beyond. "It was embarrassing, but not for us"--not for the state's Republicans. Kurt Schmoke, the former (Democratic) mayor of Baltimore, and now the dean of Howard Law School, appears to agree: "I was sad and disgusted, to hear what some of my Democratic colleagues were saying. I didn't believe it at first. It really shocked me. The public doesn't deserve this sort of thing, and Michael Steele in particular doesn't deserve it." Schmoke believes that the furor has helped Steele, in that "it has given him so much attention." Most others concur, including the candidate himself: People sense that he is something different, and figure he won't wilt. Kenneth Blackwell is Ohio's secretary of state, and he is running for governor there. He says that black Republicans--of whom he is one--should wear racial attacks as "a badge of honor": "Because if you weren't a threat," to establishments both black and white, "they wouldn't bother with you."

RICHES, OF A SORT

Michael Steele's story is fairly well-known, and will become even more so. There is an element of black Horatio Alger about it. Born 47 years ago in Prince George's County, Md.; raised in D.C. The family was poor, his mother working at a laundromat. But, as Steele said in his Senate announcement speech, he grew up in a "rich home--rich beyond our bank account. It was rich in character." His mother refused welfare, believing that it amounted to the government's raising her children. Young Mike was an altar boy--literally--and attended parochial schools. For college, he went to Johns Hopkins, becoming president of his senior class. He also felt the magic of Ronald Reagan. After college, he spent some time as a seminarian, and then enrolled in Georgetown Law.

Steele was not an instant success, kicking around some, striving and failing, losing money. Indeed, his financial history is an issue in the Senate campaign, with opponents sniffing around credit reports and such. But at each stage, Steele showed unusual determination and drive. In the 1980s, he got involved with the Maryland GOP, and in 1998 he sought the party's nomination for state comptroller. He finished third. But two years later, he was elected chairman of the state GOP.

Essentially, Steele is a Reaganite, and also a staunch supporter of George W. Bush. (Unfortunately for Steele, Bush's standing in Maryland is even lower than it is in the rest of the country. But the lieutenant governor is unlikely to run away from the president.) Ken Blackwell puts it nicely: Steele is "singularly focused on empowering people. He's not a statist, but a firm believer in individual dignity." He is both anti-abortion and anti-capital punishment. (Governor Ehrlich takes the opposite positions.) In a bit of heterodoxy--or further heterodoxy, if you count the stance against capital punishment--he is a supporter of affirmative action, though not in crude forms. In his speech at the 2004 national convention, he cited a striking list of heroes: Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, and Maebell Turner. This last is the candidate's mother, a strong Roosevelt Democrat, even now.

I have read somewhere that he is a member of the NAACP. Is it true? "Yes," says Steele, "it's true. That reminds me: I have to renew my membership." Steele stresses the bipartisan, or nonpartisan, roots of the organization. "Julian Bond and others have turned it into something else, but the NAACP was always above party and ideology, interested in only what was right, period." Steele is not yet ready to give up on it.

In 2002, Ehrlich, a U.S. congressman, asked Steele to join him on the gubernatorial ticket. The odds were heavily stacked against the Republicans: Maryland is 2 to 1 Democratic, and there hadn't been a Republican governor since ... Agnew, not a reassuring name. As Ehrlich is the first to admit, the conditions had to be "perfect" for his campaign to succeed, "and the campaign had to be perfect, too." They were, and it was. Steele--handsome, personable, dynamic--did his part. Maryland Republicans are pleased to note that the state had never before had a mixed-race ticket, and, lo, it was a Republican one. But make no mistake, says Ehrlich: "Mike was not put on the ticket with the idea that he would generate black votes. We're not naive. But we were reformers, and we were presenting a different kind of party." Steele, Ehrlich is fond of saying, is "inconvenient"--inconvenient to elites both black and white. "He upsets their notion of what a black man should be, what he ought to think. He is his own person."

All agree that, as lieutenant governor, Steele has played a significant role in the administration. His portfolio includes education, a faith-based initiative, minority business enterprise, and trade. He takes a particular--and politically rare--interest in the fortunes of ex-cons. Governor Ehrlich points out that the state constitution assigns no duties to the lieutenant governor, "so the job description is whatever the governor wants the job description to be"--and Ehrlich has relied on Steele, giving him "wide latitude." A four-year record "gives Mike a lot to run on."

In the summer of 2004, Steele was tabbed to speak at that national convention, and some touted him as a kind of answer to Barack Obama, the (black) Democrat who was running for the Senate in Illinois, and had electrified the Democratic convention. (Obama eventually won, of course--over another black candidate, Republican Alan Keyes.) Steele himself gave a rousing speech, in which he linked the GOP to civil rights, and spoke a familiar credo, often attributed to Lincoln: "... You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred...."

Nor did he ignore foreign policy, showing some tartness: "[Senator Kerry] recently said that he doesn't want to use the word 'war' to describe our efforts to fight terrorism. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to use the words 'commander in chief' to describe John Kerry." That one sent Vice President Cheney rocketing out of his chair, and the rest of Republicandom enjoyed it as well.

'READY TO GO'

Party leaders in Washington urged Steele to run for the Senate, and he has accepted the challenge. Obviously, you would not want to bet the ranch on him, given the Democratic coloration of Maryland, and the cloudy picture for Republicans in 2006: It promises to be tough all over. What you can safely bet on is that race will continue to rear its head. In 1998, the Democrats did a number on Ellen Sauerbrey, the Republican nominee for governor. At the eleventh hour--under the guidance of operative Bob Shrum--they launched an ad campaign depicting Sauerbrey as a racist. This was too much for honest Democrats, including Schmoke, who was mayor. ("I know the difference between a political conservative and a racist.") But the campaign had its effect, and Sauerbrey went down.

"Do you have your chin strap buckled?" I ask Steele. "Oh, I've got mine buckled," he answers. "The question is, do they have theirs buckled, because they've never run across a Republican like me. I learned the game from them. I've watched them for years. And they'd better be buckled up, because I'm ready to go." Four years ago, the Ehrlich-Steele ticket won about 15 percent of the black vote. Can Steele, by himself, as a Senate candidate, win more? "! don't know," he says. (Governor Ehrlich, in a separate conversation, answers in exactly the same, direct way.) But Steele is ready to campaign everywhere, as he and Ehrlich did in 2002--"going to every neighborhood, talking about poverty, talking about entrepreneurism, taking on taboos." He knows that a few white conservatives will vote against him, or stay away from the polls, because of his skin color: "The Klan's running around the state here and there. Sure, sure." But he also maintains that "there will be some black liberals who hold their noses and vote for me."

And he emphasizes that there are many views among black Marylanders, as there are among black Americans in general. A Democratic congressman from the state, Albert Wynn, who is black, said something interesting the other day. He told Black Enterprise magazine, "[Steele] talks about values, and we've got some values issues in the African-American community that make him attractive to some people." In common with many black conservatives, Steele has a lot of what Thomas Sowell dubs "private support"--people confide to you that they like you and agree with you, but wouldn't necessarily want it known. Steele says, chuckling, "People come up all the time and whisper in my ear, saying, 'I voted for you.' I tell them, 'Why are you whispering? We won!'" Kurt Schmoke is one of many Democrats who say that two-party competitiveness is good for blacks at large. "The refrain has always been, 'Democrats take us for granted, and Republicans ignore us.'" But if Republicans take a serious, sustained interest in black votes--look out.

Black Republicans who run for office are still a select group, but that group is growing. There's Steele in Maryland, and Blackwell in Ohio. Keith Butler, a pastor and former Detroit city councilman, is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. Michael Williams is the railroad commissioner of Texas, not the grandest position, but one from which Williams will almost certainly go on to grander things. Lynn Swann, the football great, is eyeing the governorship of Pennsylvania. And more than a few talk about America's secretary of state the country's second straight black, Republican secretary of state--for the presidential ticket in 2008. There may soon come a day when black-Republican candidates are unremarkable. But that will not be tomorrow. Blackwell notes that, at this point in his long career, "I receive 50 percent of the black vote." One has to understand that "that's a direct threat to the Democratic party's base, and they will stop at nothing to protect their turf. There's no dignity, no principle--it's just a no-holds-barred assault."

It is possible that the Maryland Senate race will feature two black nominees: Steele who is running unopposed for the Republican nomination and Kweisi Mfume. The likelier Democratic nominee, however, is Congressman Benjamin Cardin (who is white). Every observer agrees that Steele would have an easier time against Mfume, who carries more baggage than Cardin, who is considered likable and competent. Does Steele agree with "every observer"? "I don't care who my opponent is. I'll take whoever shows up. You know why? Because I'm not running against anyone. I'm running for something. I want an honest debate, about serious ideas, and let the voters make up their minds."

An honest debate, about serious ideas--free of racial defamation and malice. Wouldn't that be something?