Michael Steele in a Dress?

By JOHN FUND

Michael Steele made Republicans cringe with his many gaffes during the two years he chaired the Republican National Committee. Now Republicans are gleefully compiling "The Thoughts of Chairwoman Debbie," a collection of the bizarre statements made by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who took over the Democratic National Committee last month.

"We own the economy," she said this week at a breakfast sponsored by Politico.com. "We own the beginning of the turnaround, and we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery." The economy, she said, "has turned around" since President Obama took office, leaving many reporters who had asked her about rising unemployment numbers scratching their heads in puzzlement. "I've really seen such a velocity of spin with so little heft behind it," one told me.

But that's only the beginning. Last week she said that Republicans "want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally and very transparently block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote for Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it's nothing short of that blatant." Their crime? Republican governors have recently signed laws that require voters to show photo ID at the polls, a position backed by more than 80% of Americans in many published surveys.

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DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz

The week before that statement, Ms. Wasserman Schultz announced that the GOP was engaged in "a war on women" and for good measure were backing a Medicare reform plan that would allow insurance companies to "throw you to the wolves" and "deny you coverage and drop you for pre-existing conditions." This prompted FactCheck.org to declare her statements on Medicare "simply wrong."

But her biggest faux pas may have come when she accused Republicans of being against having a U.S. car industry. "If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side, we would be driving foreign cars," she told reporters at a meeting organized by the Christian Science Monitor. "They would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes." According to Florida motor vehicle records, the Wasserman Schultz household owns a 2010 Infiniti FX35, a Japanese car. The car appears to be hers, since its license plate includes her initials. Ms. Wasserman Schultz responded to that news by accusing her critics of trying to distract people from the substance of her point.

Actually, what has become increasingly clear during from her short tenure as DNC chief is that Ms. Wasserman Schultz rarely touches on substance because she is too busy throwing out incendiary rhetoric that can't stand up to scrutiny.

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