Steele Campaign Seen in Disarray
Communications Chief Latest to Quit

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 18, 2006

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.

Professional staffers, including Alcivar, argued that it was unwise for Steele to try to "go about his business" until September, the sources said.

The dispute came to a head with Steele's stem cell blunder at the Baltimore Jewish Council last week. The Steele loyalists said he should not have been dissecting the issue, especially with a reporter in the room.

Stem cell research was particularly ill-suited for a dialogue, the loyalists said, because it draws attention to Steele's anti-abortion stance and raises the potential for him to publicly differ with Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R).

The professional staffers argued that, had Steele been better prepared to face unanticipated questions, he might have avoided the kind of lengthy, stream-of-consciousness reply that left him equating the research to Holocaust experimentation.

Those closely monitoring the race said the resulting firestorm has left some Marylanders, and some national Republicans who have considered pouring cash into his Senate bid, reexamining whether Steele is ready for the race.

Although national Republican leaders including the president aggressively courted Steele to run for the open Maryland seat this year, his actual campaign experience is limited. He ran once, unsuccessfully, in a GOP primary for state comptroller in 1998 before being tapped as Ehrlich's running mate in 2002.

Jennifer E. Duffy, an analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said the events of the past few weeks have made it "fairly clear that he has limited experience as a candidate.

"When you get into a Senate campaign and you're out there on your own, it's a whole different ballgame," Duffy said.

Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of The Hotline, a political newsletter, said signs of inexperience might have gone unnoticed had Steele not been running in a major media market in a race that has been touted by national GOP leaders as their best chance in years to bring an African American Republican to the U.S. Senate.

"In some ways, the national party brought this upon Steele by hyping his campaign so much, so early," Todd said. "They forgot this was a guy who has run one other campaign ever."

Those who remain with the campaign said yesterday that that view is not shared by national party leaders. And they are undeterred by any unrest at campaign headquarters.

"There's no end to anonymous sources who are happy to speak poorly about candidates running for office. I'm not able to change that," Anderson said. "But I would say this: I really like where he is in this thing right now."

For now, Alcivar's departure may resolve any power struggle. Steele aides said they plan to replace him, and former campaign manager Graham Shafer, with more accommodating operatives, perhaps even Democrats, who have a willingness to buck the strategic instincts of Washington's consultant class.