You are listening to another no fair remembering stuff, the Tuesday edition of the Professional Left podcast,

and available wherever you get your podcasts, and at our website, pro-leftpod.com, where you can also

contribute to this podcast. There is a Patreon button at our website. Or you can mail us a letter

and or contribution at The Professional Left, P.O. Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791.

And it's not safe for work. And today we're going to start out in July of the year 2000.

The governor of Texas, George W. Bush, had won the Republican nomination

for president and was campaigning hard in what was going to be an extremely close contest between Bush

and President Bill Clinton's Vice President Al Gore. It's a race that would not be decided

until the Republican majority on the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to Bush on December 12, 2000,

making Bush the only president to win the election but lose the popular vote since 1888,

and only the fourth president in American history.

It was always going to be a close thing, so Bush went looking for votes everywhere, including the NAACP, where you delivered a long speech on July 9, 2000, which is remembered today for only one segment.

Quote, discrimination is still a reality, even when it takes different forms.

Instead of Jim Crow, there's racial redlining and profiling.

Instead of separate but equal, there's separate and forgotten. Strong civil rights enforcement

will be a cornerstone of my administration. And I will confront another form of bias, the soft

bigotry of low expectations, unquote.

On today's show, we're going to look back at the career of one of Americans' greatest beneficiaries of the soft bigotry of low expectations, Michael Steele.

Yeah.

By the way, he's just been given his own show on MSNBC.

Yes, he has.

We're going to discuss how Michael Steele came to be who he is today

...