By Lee A. Daniels

Little more than a year ago, in his slender volume, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, Shelby Steele, with glib assurance, told the world that Barack Obama couldn’t possibly win the presidency. That bit of conventional wisdom was released with wonderful timing in January 2008-just as Obama was about to win the Iowa Democratic Caucus, electrifying the political universe and instantly making him the leading contender for the Democratic nomination.

It also made A Bound Man a high-profile example of how often the conventional wisdom of pundits like Steele and of the mainstream media in general was wrong about Obama’s conduct of his campaign and the public’s reaction to it.

Now, Steele comes forward, in a March 16 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, to proclaim with suave assurance that the “GOP can’t win with minorities.”

Not that it’s the GOP’s fault, mind you.

Oh, no. The problem, as Steele declares in the column’s first sentence, is that “Today conservatism is stigmatized in our culture as an antiminority political philosophy.”

Shelby Steele

There. A nice, abstract sentence-deliberately put in the passive voice, the better to be deeply opaque, with no trace of human action in it. It’s the perfect opening to an exercise steeped in evasion. Rather than confronting the two in-your-face questions now battering the Republican Party, “What happened?” and “How can we rebound?” Steele takes shelter in the realm of make-believe.

First, he asserts that black Americans’ wholesale antipathy toward the GOP is all the fault of the white liberals and leftist radicals of the 1960s (and the blacks who let themselves be beguiled by them) who pushed such “social engineering” schemes as “identity politics” and a “draconian regimen of school busing.”

This indulgence in the passions of political theater, he claims, overwhelmed conservatism’s quiet moral force which blacks, if they were smart, should have flocked to: as a redoubt where the commitment to “the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom” is the overriding principle.

It is a principle, Steele writes revealingly, that strips those blacks who embrace it of any connection to the black American sub-culture. He makes it clear that he considers such a connection worthless, and that blacks who cling to a racially-based identity are merely choosing to be “ciphers,” pawns of either white segregationists or white liberals. “Until my encounter with conservatism,” Steele declares, “I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other-two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior.”

But in fact Steele never does define what conservatism is, beyond a holier-than-thou do-nothing-ism. What is clear, however, is that a great part of conservatism’s lure for Steele is not its so-called individualistic ethos, though he bandies that concept about. Rather, Shelby Steele’s attraction to conservatism is largely ego-centric: It is all about him.

This observation comes as no surprise to anyone who’s labored through his too-numerous-to-mention retellings of the story of his life he would have us believe. That stew of me-me-me reached its logical absurdity in A Bound Man. The book was unintended comedy for three reasons. The first was, as I’ve stated, the timing of its appearance.

Secondly, Steele could be so unobservant about the gale-force winds blowing over the political landscape because A Bound Man wasn’t really about Barack Obama at all. It was about Shelby Steele telling the world how different he is from other black Americans, even those first-generation biracial ones who vote Democratic. (Steele has said he voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin last November.)

And the final laugh-out-loud facet of A Bound Man is that Steele,  claimed in it that he understood Obama’s wrestle with the “burden” of his black heritage because he, like Obama, was born of a black father and a white mother. In short, Steele — who had parlayed denunciations of blackness and “identity politics” into a cushy sinecure at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford — was declaring that the similarity of their racial backgrounds made him a credible analyst of Obama.

A similar slipperiness is on display in Steele’s Wall Street Journal op-ed. Strikingly, he omits any reference to the real-world GOP politics of the last twelve years.

He doesn’t mention that since 1994, the GOP has elected only two blacks to Congress, and that there has not been a black Republican in Congress since mid-2002. He doesn’t mention that both Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell publicly and pointedly broke Republican ranks to support affirmative action in the 2003 University of Michigan case that was decided by the Supreme Court. Nor that black Americans by a significant majority opposed the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq from the beginning. Nor Hurricane Katrina. Nor the astonishing flailing of the new, black chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele. Nor, finally, does Shelby Steele propose what conservatism can do to reduce the intensity of the social catastrophe being generated within black America by the national and global economic crisis.

Instead, Steele’s writing is even more arid than usual, revealing his disinterest in even suggesting how the GOP can attract black votes. The roots of that disinterest? An unstated concern that such an effort would dilute the “special position” he and the few other prominent black conservatives hold in the otherwise lily-white conservative universe.

In other words, although Steele and other black conservatives denounce black progressives for playing “racial identity politics,” they themselves have always practiced what they’ve preached against. They’ve always aimed to be the only black in the room. Not surprisingly, Steele ends the column on a note of retreat from engaging society’s problems. “The challenge for conservatives today is simply self-acceptance, and even a little pride in the way we flail away at problems with an invisible hand.”

This isn’t a philosophy of individualism. This is Shelby Steele’s rationalization for doing nothing. While Barack Obama, the visible man whose failure he prophesied, stands at the world’s pinnacle of power and responsibility, Shelby Steele spends his time spinning philosophical nonsense from an ideologically-claustrophobic corner of American life.

Who is the bound man now?

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc.