Shawn Steel threw himself into politics on the streets of the San Fernando Valley in 1964 by ripping down Lyndon Johnson posters at construction sites. In the Youth for Goldwater brigades, it was known as “sniping.”
“You peel off their stuff and trash it, and you put up your stuff. I loved it,” Steel recalled. “I learned to be confrontational pretty early.”
Decades later, Steel, now the state Republican Party chairman, still has a knack for confrontation, even when others–important others–would like him to back off.
The others include White House advisors who thought Steel went a step too far in May when he wrote an article saying that President Bush’s system for naming judges in California was “half-baked.”
So Bush confidant Marc Racicot, chairman of the Republican National Committee, bounced Steel from the RNC executive committee, which did nothing to stop Steel’s public challenge of the Bush forces.
The dust-up was only one of the reasons for Steel’s schism with his party’s presidential administration and many high-ranking elected California Republicans. In the 19 months that he has held the top state party post, he has rankled nerves from Washington to Sacramento to Orange County, where a state party convention starts today in Garden Grove. In that way, he has come to symbolize the infighting that has distracted the state party for years from its central–and largely elusive–goal: winning elections.
Steel, not surprisingly, will be part of the convention show as allies seek to restore powers that were stripped from him months into his tenure.
To Steel’s friends, his tendency to blurt out thoughts before weighing the consequences is a large part of his gregarious charm, but also his Achilles heel.
“Shawn’s willing to charge up the hill before he’s got the battle all mapped out,” said U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach).
Others have more critical assessments of the Rolling Hills lawyer, who also teaches ethics at a school for chiropractors.
“He’s the crazy uncle we want to hide in the basement,” said a top state Republican whose opinion of Steel is shared by several others.
Steel lost powers in a state party overhaul engineered by Bush allies. Control of the party’s money was yanked from the state chairman and entrusted instead to a board of directors. But Steel, a GOP activist for more than three decades, has jealously guarded his key remaining function: the power to speak out.
The biggest and most damaging of Steel’s feuds is the one with President Bush’s top political man in California, Gerald L. Parsky, who led the party overhaul. Although Steel has campaigned hard for Bush, gubernatorial nominee Bill Simon Jr. and other Republicans, he and his loyalists have refused to drop their anti-Parsky crusade.
“His tactics vis-a-vis [Parsky] have been at times inappropriate and not helpful to the party,” said state GOP Treasurer Douglas Boyd, a friend of Steel.
Many GOP leaders view the dispute as an ego-driven power struggle, but Steel says he is fighting to safeguard Republican influence over the federal courts.
He blames Parsky for setting up judicial screening committees that give Democratic senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein a say in Bush’s nominees to the bench. Steel calls Boxer and Feinstein “mortal enemies” of Republicans.
“Gerry Parsky is well-meaning, naive, inexperienced, and not politically sophisticated,” Steel said during a San Francisco meeting of the RNC in July.
Parsky, a Rancho Santa Fe investment mogul, responded: “I’m only doing what the president of the United States has asked me to do in California, including chairing the statewide judicial review committee.”
White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said the administration stands by the judicial screening system, and Bush’s political team has locked arms with Parsky.
“Gerry is our friend, our colleague, and part of the family that is focused on doing everything we can to win this campaign for Bill Simon,” said Jack Oliver, deputy chairman of the RNC.
At the convention this weekend, the intraparty feuding threatens to shatter the image of unity that Republicans hope to project as they pay tribute to Simon.
Steel allies have called for a vote on restoring his spending power. They also have proposed a resolution calling for “termination of the Parsky/Boxer/Feinstein judicial committees as a failed experiment.” After squawking from the Simon campaign, Steel agreed to try to postpone the votes until after the Nov. 5 election, but other Republicans may still press forward.
Apart from the Parsky feud, Steel has also clashed with the state top Republicans: Sen. Jim Brulte of Rancho Cucamonga and Assemblyman Dave Cox of Fair Oaks. Cox bridled at Steel’s suggestion that GOP lawmakers return a $50,000 contribution from Enron.
“Mr. Steel can return any money he wants to–that’s his,” Cox said.
Cox also “exploded” last week when Steel was quoted in the New York Times lamenting a leadership vacuum in the California GOP, according to a Republican leader. Cox and Brulte were in New York raising money at the time, and potential donors asked them about Steel’s comments, the Republican said. Brulte called Steel to complain.
Steel said he meant to bemoan the dearth of Republican elected officials, not the quality of party leaders.
Steel’s outspokenness has even caused consternation at home, where he and his wife, Michelle Eun Joo Park Steel, live with two daughters, 12 and 15, and his wife’s mother.
“I always tell him, you have to think things over before you speak out,” his wife said.
Steel, 56, was raised in Sherman Oaks by his mother and her succession of four husbands. His father, the first, was a heavy drinker and gambler who abandoned the family when Steel was a baby.
Politics, Steel said, “rescued kind of an aimless drift of a life” soon after he started at Van Nuys High School. After the Goldwater campaign, he volunteered for Ronald Reagan’s 1966 race for governor.
He used his networking skills (he calls himself “very much a people person”) to climb quickly to the state chairman’s post at Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative group formed to counter the student antiwar movement.
Steel was drawn to the Republican Party mainly by the fight against communism, but also by a firm belief in limited government. His staunch libertarian views have kept him in good standing with the conservatives who would later elect him state party chairman. A longtime member of the National Rifle Assn., he owns two pistols and a shotgun. “I’m a big 2nd Amendment guy,” he said.
But on other touchstone issues, his views are less popular with the right, so he plays them down. He said he backs job benefits for gay domestic partners. And although he opposes late-term abortions and supports parental consent for minors seeking abortions, Steel also said government generally should not block women from getting abortions.
“I don’t think I have a right to deny it to anybody,” he said. “I’m very wary of governmental involvement in people’s lives.”
Still, conservatives have been the backbone of Steel’s support within the party. He was treasurer and vice chairman before winning the top job.
As Steel rose through the party ranks, he also built an independent law practice. He set up shop in mid-Wilshire in 1978, just as thousands of immigrants were transforming part of the area into Koreatown.
“He was very astute in going into the community and meeting chiropractors and doctors and auto-body repairmen, and being, I guess, a politician,” recalled Jim Stroud, a lawyer who worked with Steel.
Steel handled car accident, medical malpractice and immigration cases. A Steel specialty was legal work for chiropractors and acupuncturists. He teaches an ethics class at Cleveland Chiropractic College in Los Angeles.
At a lecture Monday morning, he worked the classroom aisles in the style of Phil Donahue as he reviewed an essay called “The Trouble with Trial Lawyers.”
“There’s a patient or two out there who might see you as nothing but a money tree,” he warned students.
But in the final weeks of election season, Steel devotes most of his time to politics.
As party leader, he has tried to broaden outreach to minority voters and recruit a broad range of moderate and conservative candidates, said GOP consultant Allan Hoffenblum.
But the “ego battle between him and Parsky” has been deeply divisive for the party, Hoffenblum said.
Rohrabacher, though, said Steel “was never given a chance to fail or succeed in the exercise of the authority that he rightfully won” before Parsky led the overhaul of the party.
For now, Steel has vowed to lie low and try to help fellow Simon supporters avert squabbles at the convention.
“I’m not going to take on Mr. Parsky or say anything hostile about him at all,” Steel said. “Until the election is over.”