you are a magnet, and i am steele

the republican national committee has chosen it's new leader.

it took six rounds of balloting (so long they had to rush through the rest of the days voting because a wedding party was waiting to get into the hall - no kidding) and the winner got only six more votes than the 85 he needed to win, but the leader of the rnc tonight is a black man.

he's also mike tyson's former brother-in-law.

the republican party – whose minneapolis convention was a muggy sea of pasty whiteness (causing me to blurt out, "where are the black people? where are the hispanics? where are the gays, for crying out...? well okay...there aren't gonna be gays...") – has chosen michael steele, one of it's only black members, to be their leader.

the party's other black member had to drop out of the running in order for steele to win.

is this a positive step for the republican party? sure, if only symbolically. it's a positive step for the country: the leaders of both political parties in the united states are black men. that's a pretty remarkable thing.

but let's be realistic. in the end, for the rnc, this race was between katon dawson, a man who only recently dropped his membership in a whites-only country club, who became a republican because the democrats desegregated his school in the 1950's, and steele, the guy who thought obama "played the race card beautifully" during the presidential campaign, and who in 2006 stood before a group of jewish leaders and compared stem cell research to holocaust atrocities and slavery.

these are serious choices, people.