Steele Campaign Seen in Disarray

[ProSense]

A campaign geared to the clueless (and that's being nice)

Steele Campaign Seen in Disarray

Communications Chief Latest to Quit

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 18, 2006; Page B01

In a matter of weeks, Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele lost his campaign manager, offended an audience of Jewish leaders by comparing stem cell research to Nazi experimentation and then confounded a conservative talk show audience by saying he actually supports embryonic research.

Yesterday came more turmoil, as the Republican with the best chance of winning a U.S. Senate seat from Maryland in two decades lost his communications director, Leonardo Alcivar, who resigned.

The public signs of disarray have exposed what campaign insiders confirmed yesterday are even deeper internal problems, stemming from a rift between Steele's longtime loyalists and the professional consultants who trooped to Annapolis to run his first big-league campaign.

In interviews this week, sources familiar with the inner workings of Steele's campaign described an increasingly caustic dispute that left a number of the candidate's professional advisers cut off from Steele and his closest aides.

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR2006021702091.html?nav=rss_metro/md

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[MrBenchley]

1. The Maryland GOP PAID Steele

to campaign for his current position...

And hilariously, he's most famous for the phony story about how he was "pelted with Oreos" when he appeared at a black college...but the fact that it resonates only among folks like Pat Robertson and Newsmax indicates that if it HAD happened, it would have been justified...

[JNelson6563]

2. This sums it up nicely

From the article:

Jim Jordan, a Democratic operative who once led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said this type of internal struggle is a common byproduct of national races involving untested candidates.

"The fact is, the higher up the ladder you climb, these races get more complicated and more difficult, and it's not always the case that longtime staff and advisers are ready to play at the new level," Jordan said.

As I read the snippet in the OP I thought, this is pretty common. Candidates who cling to the familiar, no matter how illequipped or unqualified, instead of being willing to adapt to a larger scale, more efficient strategy will fail. Many will achieve failure long before the actual election day.

Julie