Steele Campaign Seen in Disarray

Communications Chief Latest to Quit

Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, left, who is running for the U.S. Senate, attended a rally last week in Annapolis with Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (By Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

In a matter of weeks, Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele lost his campaign manager, offended an audience of Jewish leaders by comparing stem cell research to Nazi experimentation and then confounded a conservative talk show audience by saying he actually supports embryonic research.

Yesterday came more turmoil, as the Republican with the best chance of winning a U.S. Senate seat from Maryland in two decades lost his communications director, Leonardo Alcivar, who resigned.

The public signs of disarray have exposed what campaign insiders confirmed yesterday are even deeper internal problems, stemming from a rift between Steele's longtime loyalists and the professional consultants who trooped to Annapolis to run his first big-league campaign.

In interviews this week, sources familiar with the inner workings of Steele's campaign described an increasingly caustic dispute that left a number of the candidate's professional advisers cut off from Steele and his closest aides.

The lieutenant governor's longtime supporters said yesterday that they have tried to fend off a national GOP "consultant culture" that espouses a cookie-cutter approach ill-suited for Maryland, a state dominated by Democratic voters.

National advisers, however, described Steele loyalists as rigid and unsophisticated about the needs of a campaign of that scale. They said a parochial approach being counseled by Steele aides was destined to fail in a media-driven race that has drawn national attention and could cost more than $10 million before it's done.

Where Steele comes down in the dispute is unclear -- he was on a fundraising trip yesterday and could not be reached. But one professional strategist who has remained with the campaign, Curt Anderson, disputed the idea that the turnover has in any way hurt the candidate.

"Every campaign has competing ideas from within," said Anderson, whose firm OnMessage Inc. is a general consultant to the campaign. "You get more advice than you can take, and that's just the nature of the beast."

Jim Jordan, a Democratic operative who once led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said this type of internal struggle is a common byproduct of national races involving untested candidates.

"The fact is, the higher up the ladder you climb, these races get more complicated and more difficult, and it's not always the case that longtime staff and advisers are ready to play at the new level," Jordan said.

In Steele's case, the dispute underscores a distinctive problem -- that he's a social conservative with strong ties to President Bush and Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, running in a state where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1.

To combat that disadvantage, Steele has attempted to wage a party-neutral campaign. His longtime chief of staff, Paul Ellington, has backed a strategy to focus on fundraising and mechanics, to talk predominantly with small-town community newspapers and to not engage in debate with Democrats until after the opposition's hotly contested primary election in September, according to two sources familiar with the internal dispute, who spoke on the condition they not be named.