Aloha and Namaste everyone and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, a puck and

Odyssey joint featuring lively, in-depth conversations with the people who cruised the corridors

of power in America, sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture.

It was not all that long ago that Michael Steele was about as big a deal as you can be in the Republican

Party.

He had served as the seventh lieutenant governor of Maryland, card-carrying member of the GOP from 2003 to 2007, and then he

graduated and became the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2009 until 2011,

in the wake of Barack Obama's victory at a time when the Republican Party thought that it could

never attain majority status in America,

let alone a stable political majority, without appealing in a pretty dramatic way to people of

color.

Michael Steele, a person of color, an African American, made sense.

He could be the chair of the RNC.

It did not go all that well.

And since that time, Michael Steel has increasingly been alienated from the Republican Party that he still calls his own to the point where now, although he continues to maintain that he is a member of the Republican Party for reasons that he explains on today's

episode that are quite amusing.

He has drifted far enough away from the party that he is a primetime host on MSNBC.

Having moved from the weekends to the weeknights, he now hosts a show actually called

the weeknight and he has become someone who is one of those Republicans or former

Republicans or apostate Republicans or lapsed Republicans who many Democrats have come to love.

He is because of that varied experience and it's not so much a journey across the ideological

spectrum as a guy who basically stayed exactly

...