Steele: I Won't Step Down

Michael Steele says he won’t be stepping down as the chairman of the RNC, and thinks the concern over his spending has been blown out of proportion. “A lot of our major donors are used to a particular type of event. We’ve been scaling those back,” he told Good Morning America. “The bottom line is, I hear my donors, I hear our base. We’re taking steps to make sure we’re even more fiscally conservative in our spending.”

When asked if he thought he had a slimmer margin of error because he was black, Steele replied, “The honest answer is yes. Barack Obama has a slimmer margin. A lot of folks do. That’s just the reality of it.” But he thinks his real problem is that he’s not a “Washington insider.” He says his politics are more “grassroots oriented, so I tend to come at it a little bit stronger, a little bit more street-wise, if you will.” (More Michael Steele stories.)