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.
