When Steele met Sharpton

What strikes first is not what’s being said, but how it is said. Steele is comfortable, genuinely comfortable, up there. He sounds different. He sounds … like himself? The stiffness and combativeness that render his TV interviews awkward is gone. So is that doubly awkward black inflection that so often creeps in. He’s speaking like a friend among friends, easy and eloquent. And judging by the response, he is among friends, or least fellows: The audience is clearly comfortable, too. Steele’s job, he says, is to turn the elephant. “Now, I don’t know if any of you have ever had to turn an elephant, but the end you have to start with is not necessarily the best place to start.” This gets a good laugh. A bit later: “Certainly one of the lessons I’ve learned and the challenges that I’ve had in this job is that you can’t please everyone, but you can certainly make them all mad at you at the same time.” This gets a great laugh. Later still, a story. When Steele became lieutenant governor of Maryland in 2003, he was told that his office had belonged to Thomas Jefferson in the early days of the republic. “And I would sit there from time to time and I would think to myself, Thomas Jefferson must be saying to himself, ‘How did a brother wind up in my office?” Roars to the roof. “Well, Sally Hemings knows how I wound up in that office!” Through the roof!

But also: Huh?…

There is polite applause at the end, no Q-and-A time, and a rapid mass exodus, Steele leading the way. Did anything he said surprise any of the NAN Delegates? “No,” the answer comes from one. And no, and no, and no again from three more. “I felt he was just trying to convert us to his party there at the end,” the last elaborates.