I'm Michael Steele, and I Approve This Message

At the time when the World Wide Web was first catching on in the early 1990's, I was a student employee in the University of Maryland's Computer Science Department's systems staff lab. Our supervisor assigned us all to learn HTML to help the department create a web presence. We wrote our own homepages with a little about ourselves and links to our friends in the lab (a social network before social networks were cool). In 1995, the Internet's first search engine was born: Alta Vista. Naturally, the first thing any of us searched for was our own names. Since I had my own web page and a respectable presence on the web's social predecessor, Usenet, many of the links on the first page of search results led back to the real me. There were some other Michael Steele's out there too; there was a professor at Penn and the bassist from The Bangles, but I was clearly one of the most popular Michael Steele's on the web.

Then, in 2000, a relatively unknown local attorney and politician named Michael Steele became the chairman of the Republican Party in my home state of Maryland. In 2002, Maryland gubernatorial candidate Robert Erlich picked the other Michael Steele to be his running mate. At first, it was fun. After Michael Steele won the election and became Lt. Governor, I got several congratulatory messages on my home answering machine. A confused newspaper reporter from California called one day. (Unlike that other guy, my home phone number is publicly listed, so people calling information and asking for Michael Steele from Maryland would get my phone number.)

My friends and I thought this was all very amusing, seeing as how this other Michael Steele and I were on opposite sides of the political and skin tone spectrums. When people inevitably commented on my namesake, I joked that he was my evil twin, because if there's one thing we've learned from television, the the guy with the facial hair is always the evil twin. This almost provoked a problem at my polling station on election day one year, when a Republican election worker commented on my name and I responded with that line. Turns out she had just had lunch with our former Lt. Governor the week before, was a friendly acquaintance of his, and didn't think I was clever. The precinct's head judge was not amused that we were talking politics at the check-in table. "Hey, your worker brought up the subject, not me."

Anyway, fun and jokes aside, that began the slow erosion of my good name on the Internet, much to my chagrin. That other Michael Steele gained national recognition as one of the few prominent African American Republican politicians. Michael Steele ran for the Maryland's US Senate seat in 2006 and gained more national exposure. In 2009, he became the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and was being asked for his opinion on every topic under the sun and quoted in every newspaper and media outlet. Today when I search the Internet for my own name, I have to search through pages and pages of Google results about this other guy before I come to anything remotely related to the real me.

But now, I'm taking back my name. I will use all my wit and humor and clever writing abilities to win back my rightful spot atop the search results. Narcissistic? Probably. Worth my time and energy? Probably not. Fun to poke the bear? Heck yeah.