Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele hit back at Republicans sniping at his record in attempts to defend the campaign committee’s relatively minor financial involvement in the Cuccinelli campaign, by saying the D.C. GOP treated the Virginia campaign as a neglected “step child.”
“The establishment types didn’t like the Cuccinelli campaign, didn’t back the Cuccinelli campaign — for whatever their reasons were. Whether it was his hot social-conservative rhetoric from the past, whether it was the way the campaign was structured presently, I don’t know,” Steele says. ”I know I tried to raise some money for him and ran into all kinds of resistance from folks and excuses.”
“People were clearly behind the Christie effort. In a lot of respects, Cuccinelli was the step child. He was the one that people made excuses not to support . . . I think there was a conscious decision to sacrifice Virginia,” he adds.
The RNC is under fire from conservative activists because it spent just $3 million on Cuccinelli’s effort, compared with $9 million for Governor Bob McDonnell’s 2009 campaign. In defending the difference, Republicans close to the campaign argued earlier that the $9 million wasn’t a good comparison point because it was largely “frivolous” spending by Steele.
Steele says the number was relatively high in 2009 because he struck a deal with the chairman of Republican Governors Association at the time, Haley Barbour, to cover the RGA’s involvement in Virginia. Barbour reached out to Steele because the RGA was overextended and couldn’t provide the money it had committed to provide in the Old Dominion, Steele says.
As RNC chair, the former chairman says, “I backstopped everything!”