Where's the Party? Nowhere To Be Found In Steele Ads

Senate Candidate Leaves GOP, And Issues, Out of the Picture

In his latest TV commercial, Maryland senatorial candidate Michael Steele looks and sounds like a man running for talk show host. Seated informally on a big letter "S," jazzy music playing in the background, Steele takes a bold stand on . . . puppies.

"Hey, me again, Michael Steele," says the lieutenant governor, pretending to knock from the inside of the TV screen. "Soon your TV will be jammed with negative ads from the Washington crowd. Grainy pictures and spooky music saying, 'Steele hates puppies' -- and worse. For the record, I love puppies. And I think you deserve better -- some real ideas for change."

The slightly self-amused tone is just one of the things that make Steele's ads for his U.S. Senate campaign one of the more unusual of this, or any, election season. Political ads tend to come in two flavors: the kind in which candidates shake hands with supporters and embrace schoolkids, and the kind in which basso-voiced announcers warn that the opponent is bad news.

So far, Steele has taken a third approach: the candidate as your pal, the friendly, reasonable guy who's beyond politics.

In two of his first three campaign ads, Steele doesn't appear on the campaign trail or some other traditional political backdrop. He doesn't slam his Democratic opponent, Rep. Ben Cardin, or even mention that he has an opponent. Instead, he talks casually while perched on a stool or an oversize sculpture of his last name. The setting is odd and stark -- a blue-and-white backdrop that evokes the Nowhereland of Apple's iPod commercials (the Steele spots were shot in a local TV studio).

"I know what you're thinking," Steele says without a word of introduction in his first commercial, which debuted in late August. "I know what you're feeling. Washington has no clue of what's going on in your life. They blame each other, they work the angles while you're just trying to make today better than yesterday. . . . Instead of the spin, I'll talk straight about what's wrong in both parties."

The much buzzed-about spots -- created by veteran Republican adman Brad Todd of Alexandria's OnMessage Inc. -- are designed to reinforce Steele's assertion that he would be a different kind of senator. (That, in fact, is the title of the first commercial.)

To drive that message home, says political scientist Thomas Schaller, Steele had to break the conventions of political advertising. "These aren't just another red-white-and-blue, glad-hand-at-the-parade, here-are-my-three-talking-points-about-health-care ads," says Schaller, of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. "The fact is, people are talking about them and you're writing about them. That tells you how effective they are, and it compounds and magnifies their impact."

What's different, too, is what's not said in Steele's commercials.

The spots never mention that Steele is running as a Republican, or that he is the second-highest-ranking member of his party in Maryland. Or that he was once chairman of the Maryland Republican Party. Indeed, the word "Republican" doesn't appear anywhere on Steele's Web site, and his official bio omits his tenure as party chairman. When Steele won the Republican Senate primary last week, his campaign's official news release reported only that he won "his party's primary" without bothering to say which one.

This may be a bow to political reality. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by almost 2 to 1 in Maryland.

Steele also has played down any association with President Bush, whose approval ratings have been in a long slump. Steele's Web site notes the endorsements of two moderate Republicans, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, but never mentions that Bush helped raise $500,000 for his campaign last year.

Which prompts Cardin's campaign to accuse Steele of running from his party and his president. "Michael Steele's ads don't change the fact that he's a conservative Republican who has embraced President Bush's agenda," says Cardin spokesman Oren Shur, "from his support of the war in Iraq to his opposition to stem cell research to his endorsement of the president's plan to privatize Social Security."

Several other Republican candidates have been less than eager to wave the GOP banner this year. In New Jersey, Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr. calls himself an "Independent Reformer" in his ads. Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio uses the slogan "Independent Fighter for Ohio Families," while Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania and Rep. Vito Fossella of New York both use the same phrase, "Independent Fighter for Us."

Steele himself said to The Washington Post in July that running as a Republican candidate this year was akin to wearing "a scarlet letter" (he later maintained that he was joking). Nevertheless, his campaign says he is not trying to avoid the subject in his TV spots.

The ads emphasize that "he approaches issues as a different kind of candidate," said Steele's spokesman, Doug Heye. "What he has done is to build bridges against the things that divide us -- racial, economic and geographic. He has never made any bones about being a Republican."