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Steele Allies Point Fingers At Rove -- Say Former RNC Team Fanning Flames
Christina Bellantoni | April 15, 2010, 11:11AM
Seems like just about everyone is irritated with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele these days, but both friends and foes of the embattled party leader think allies of Karl Rove and former Bush-era RNC staffers are fanning the flames to make Steele's problems worse.
Republicans told me in interviews that Rove's team got cozy at the RNC during the eight years of the Bush presidency, and feathers were ruffled when Steele was elected and cleaned house. They admitted Steele has dug himself into a deep hole, but the spate of recent death watch stories on national television and gracing the nation's front pages seemed like a calculated effort to trash the chairman as revenge.
The GOP universe isn't huge -- consultants who worked with the RNC decades ago are bound to pop up again and hop from campaign to campaign. But some people tied to Rove, George W. Bush's right-hand man, were "badly, badly hurt when Michael came in," an RNC member told me in an interview. "It's no surprise he's got a collection of enemies."
Republicans said that when taking over in 2009, Steele "emptied out the building" of about 100 consultants and top aides who closely coordinated with Rove at the White House from 2001 until President Obama took office. A Republican familiar with the inner-workings of the RNC told me that Steele made a mistake asking for resignations from the old guard so quickly. Had Steele gone "more cautiously" and kept one or two members of the Rove team on board it might have avoided the bad blood, the source said.
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