More Michael Steele FAIL

So what if you began a “Freedom Tour” and nobody came? (NOTE: Scott P over at the Palmer Lyceum has an excellent post up on this too. h/t nemski)

This is another tale of FAIL from Michael Steele and the GOP efforts to reach out to minorities. He begins this tour at Howard University — the tour lands at Historically Black Colleges and here you go:

The visit didn’t exactly seem to stir the campus; in the student union building, the line to get into the cafeteria two floors below Steele’s speech was much longer than the line to get into the talk, and the first two rows were filled in, just before the program began, by about two dozen mostly white College Republicans from other D.C. universities. Questions for what was billed as a town hall meeting had to be submitted days in advance to the Howard chapter of the college GOP.

Got that? You go to a Historically Black College in the nation’s capital and you need to fill in seats with white kids from other colleges and submit your questions days earlier for screening. Then we get to the obligatory you-can-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps portion of our program:

For the first 40 minutes or so of his hour-long talk, Steele’s message boiled down to vague platitudes about black professional role models, the need for young people to pay attention to politics and the sheer unlikelihood of his journey from D.C.’s Petworth neighborhood — just a few miles up Georgia Avenue from Howard’s campus — to the top of the RNC.

That’s a message, I’m sure Howard parents are furiously calling the President and Dean to demand that never again shall a political figure provide an non-pre-approved encouraging message to their kids.

And Steele thinks that he is somehow on the same operating level as the President of the United States:

For most of the night, no matter how he tried, Steele couldn’t quite get the audience on his side. And he certainly did try. He constantly brought up Obama, asking the students if they would have ever thought “you would have two African Americans sitting atop the political class of this country.” In Steele’s mind, it seemed, being chairman of the RNC was more or less the same thing as being president. “It’s not just a political game,” he said of Washington’s policy battles. “It’s not just Barack Obama and Michael Steele going back and forth.”

Never let it be said that Steele isn’t a role model for delusional behavior. There’s more at the link — including an account of Steele badly handling a young woman who wanted to talk about health care or insurance. But it is pretty clear that few cared about what he had to say, and that run on African-American party registration switches to the GOP is still just a pipe dream.