Path to Power
Steele was born on October 19, 1958, at Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George’s County, Md. He was adopted as an infant by Maebell and William Steele and raised in nearby Washington, D.C., attending Archbishop Carroll High School, where he was class president senior year and voted "Man of the Year."
Growing up, Steele’s family was solidly Democratic. (pictures of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., hung on the family’s living room wall.) But Steele’s rightward shift was influenced by two people: his mother and Ronald Reagan. Steele’s father died in 1962 due to complications from alcoholism. His mother refused to go on welfare, choosing instead to support the family by working for minimum wage as a laundress. Steele said he later saw the same attitude reflected in Reagan's “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” message.
Steele did plenty of bootstrap-pulling on his own; he was one of the first members of his family to go to college, earning a bachelor's degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University in 1981. After graduating, he was invited to be a member of the university’s board of trustees, on which he served until 1985.
Steele spent three years at the Augustinian Friars Seminary at Villanova University, but left for a career in law. He graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1991.
After law school, Steele joined the Washington, D.C., law firm Cleary, Gottlieb,Steen & Hamilton as a corporate securities attorney. According to his official biography, he specialized in “sophisticated financial transactions on behalf of Wall Street underwriters.” His work for the firm took him to Tokyo, where he learned to speak some Japanese.
After he realized he wouldn’t make partner in 1997, Steele left Cleary, Gottlieb and worked as corporate counsel for the Mills Corporation, a real-estate development firm. But he soon went out on his own, starting a consulting firm called the Steele Group in 1998.
Maryland Republican Operative and Lieutenant Governor
In the mid-1990s, Steele began his fast rise in the Maryland Republican Party. In 1994, he became chair of Prince George’s County’s Republican Central Committee. Steele held that position until December 2000, when he became the chairman of the Maryland Republican Party, the first African-American to head a Republican Party state branch. He held that position until 2002, when Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Ehrlich asked him to join his ticket as lieutenant governor.
The infamous “Oreo Cookie Incident” took place during that campaign. Accounts differ about what happened at the 2002 debate between Ehrlich and his Democratic competitor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, but Ehrlich’s camp claimed that Democrats in the audience passed out Oreo cookies, which they then threw at Steele. Some have used the term “Oreo” as a derogatory racial reference to someone who has black skin but acts white. Though claims that protestors “pelted” Steele with Oreos have been questioned, both the Associated Press and Steele himself said they saw the cookies on the floor of the auditorium.
Ehrlich and Steele won the governor’s race in an upset. Steele became not only the first African-American elected Maryland lieutenant governor, but also the first African American to hold any statewide office in Maryland. He was the highest ranking African-American Republican at the time.
In 2004, Steele, who is known as an excellent speaker, was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention in New York City.
In 2005, at the urging of national Republicans eager to show off a talented African-American Republican, Steele launched a campaign for the open Senate seat vacated by retiring Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.). Maryland is a heavily Democratic state and Steele started out with a big disadvantage, but 2006 proved to be a terrible year for Republicans, and Steele lost to his Democratic challenger, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.)
GOPAC
Steele then became the chairman of GOPAC, a political action committee originally founded by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) aimed at “preparing a new generation of Americans to lead our country.”
Republican National Committee
In November 2008, Steele announced his candidacy for the RNC chairmanship. The Washington Post called his decision, “a move sure to shake up the evolving race for control of a party demoralized by broad losses at the ballot box.”
The Jan. 30, 2009 election began as a six-man race, and the 168 RNC members cast five ballots before whittling the race down to Steele and the more conservative South Carolina GOP Chairman Katon Dawson, who had stirred controversy when it was revealed he used to belong to a country club that did not accept African-American members. Steele won with 91 votes to Dawson's 77.
Tennessee RNC chairman Chip Saltsman also considered running, but his chances of winning were crushed after he distributed a CD at a holiday party featuring a song called, "Barack, the Magic Negro.”He dropped out of the contest the day before the vote.
