Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has belittled a new plan announced by his successor Reince Priebus, saying “numbnuts” at the RNC were repeating minority outreach efforts made during his own tenure.
“When I was chairman, we put the emphasis and the interest back in the state parties. You have 50 individual state parties that reflect a cross section of this country, so you can’t do a one-size-fits-all, you have to do a 50-state strategy,” Steele said on radio’s nationally syndicated “Andrea Tantaros Show.”
“So I was laughing at some of these numbnuts after the election talking about, ‘Oh, well, we need to do a 50-state strategy.’ Dude, where were you for 2009 and 2010? That’s exactly what we did,” Steele said.
Steele said Priebus’ announcement on Monday that the party planned to spend $10 million to embed staffers in communities across the country was a sign that the party’s apparatus was bloated.
“The national party is too big for its own britches right now. It’s centered around itself,” Steele said.
Steele even told Tantaros he could easily beat Priebus in a cage fight. “I would clean his clock. Just one knock on the head. It’s done.”
Priebus was voted RNC chairman in 2011, even though Steele had just guided the party’s successful showing in the 2010 mid-term elections when Republicans regained the House.
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