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Michael Steele has once again ruffled the feathers of fellow Republicans.

Steele, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee and the most senior African-American Republican in the Party, was elected to infuse the GOP with instant diversity.

Think of him as a Conservative Obama doppelganger.

But his boisterous style - plus the suspicion of many Party grandees that he harbors big, personal ambitions for the future - has often put him at odds with the GOP mainstream.

Now it seems that Steele has been more proficient at spending donor money than raising it.

Politico reports:

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele is spending twice as much as his recent predecessors on private planes and paying more for limousines, catering and flowers – expenses that are infuriating the party's major donors who say Republicans need every penny they can get for the fight to win back Congress.

Most recently, donors grumbled when Steele hired renowned chef Wolfgang Puck's local crew to cater the RNC's Christmas party inside the trendy Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, and then moved its annual winter meeting from Washington to Hawaii.

For some major GOP donors, both decisions were symbolic of the kind of wasteful spending habits they claim has become endemic to his tenure at the RNC. When Ken Mehlman served as the committee chairman during the critical 2006 midterm elections, the holiday party was held in a headquarters conference room and Chic-fil-A was the caterer.

A POLITICO analysis of expenses found that compared with 2005, the last comparable year preceding a midterm election, the committee’s payments for charter flights doubled; the number of sedan contractors tripled, and meal expenses jumped from $306,000 to $599,000.

“Michael Steele is an imperial chairman,” said one longtime Republican fundraiser. “He flies in private aircraft. He drives in private cars. He has private consultants that are paid ridiculous retainers. He fancies himself a presidential candidate and wants all of the trappings and gets them by using other people’s money.”

And compounding Steele's problems with his own party is the fact that Democrats seem to be well funded for the 2010 elections.  Politico reports:

In nearly every state where Republican Senate candidates have a contested primary this year, the leading Democratic Senate candidate enjoys a money advantage over his would-be foes.

Democratic officials hope that these intra-party GOP contests will further bleed the eventual Republican nominees, hobbling them as they head into the fall campaign. If already-underfunded Republican Senate candidates have to spend their cash fending off primary opponents, that will leave their war chests diminished for the general election.

In five states where potentially vulnerable Democrats are up for reelection, the incumbents enjoy a strong cash-on-hand lead over their assorted challengers. That early edge could help Arkansas's Blanche Lincoln, Colorado's Michael Bennet (who also faces a Democratic primary), California's Barbara Boxer, Nevada's Harry Reid and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter.

The Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, has come under withering criticism from fellow Republicans for his sometime weird statements and self-promoting demeanor.

Rumblings in the party have even led him to challenge Republicans to fire him:

Now on a publicity tour for his new book, Steele is in for more heat. 

Apparently his new tome, "Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda", a blue print for his party, was published without any coordination with, well, the Republican Party.

But not to worry - Steele has been put in his job by forces much mightier than Republicans. 

According to the interview with CBN:

Steele said. "But God, I really believe, has placed me here for a reason because who else and why else would you do this?"

Here's Steele on CBN (note the book he's promoting behind him):

Talking Points Memo seems to have uncovered an incoinstency in Steele's story about when he wrote the book:

Appearing today on Laura Ingraham's radio show, RNC chairman Michael Steele said that he wrote his book Right Now before he became chairman. The problem is, the book itself doesn't read like it could have possibly been written before January 2009 -- it was clearly written in late 2009, either in November or December, and is based entirely on current events up to that point.

"I wrote this book before I became chairman. Because of the clock and the calendar, I wound up doing it now," said Steele. It's not clear whether this might have been intended to somehow deflect criticism from other Republicans over the book -- GOPers have said they didn't know Steele was writing a book until it was released -- or whether he might have been speaking figuratively that he decided to write the book earlier. It's hard to know exactly what he meant.

When we here at TPM heard that Michael Steele had a new book, we immediately bought a copy and I proceeded to read the whole thing cover to cover. Unless Steele is remarkably clairvoyant, it seems as though it could not have been written before he became chairman -- it is overwhelmingly a commentary on the political situation in America under President Barack Obama, as of late 2009.

The book is full of references to current events in 2009: The stimulus bill, the health care debate, foreign policy, ACORN, the party switch of Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Tea Parties and the 9/12 March on Washington, etc.

He once promised to make Republicans the party of "hip-hop".

He was the fresh new face of a party that had been beaten and was badly in need of a new image.  Or so the panicked party poo-bahs thought.

But it has not turned out as expected.

Michael Steele, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee and effectively the chief party spokesman, is once again under attack - from other Republicans.

The Washington Post reports:

Believing that Steele's off-the-cuff remarks threaten to damage the party's brand -- at the very time when Republicans are trying to capitalize on a national political environment that may hurt Democrats -- senior aides to top Republican leaders confronted Steele's staff on a conference call Wednesday.

"You really just have to get him to stop. It's too much," a top congressional aide said on the call, according to others on the call, adding that Steele was hurting morale among Republican members of Congress and candidates.

The call turned into "a bickering match," aides said Thursday, as one top congressional staffer accused Steele of launching "a Republican apology tour at the exact wrong time." Another congressional aide said Steele was appearing on television "unprepared and unknowledgeable."

Steele's aides said on the call that their boss had hired an outside public relations firm to handle his book promotions and acknowledged that they have "no control" over booking his interviews or what he says in them. They noted that Steele had dialed back his comments about Republicans' chances in 2010 on Tuesday by telling MSNBC that he is "playing to win."

Here's Steele on FoxNews saying that the Republicans will not take over Congress in the 2010 election: