Steele: One gaffe too many?

last updated 8 January 2015

This time, Michael Steele really has gone too far, said William Kristol in The Weekly Standard. In Steele’s short tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee, rarely has a week passed without his saying or doing something that embarrasses the party. But his latest gaffe is of a different order of magnitude. Footage surfaced last week of Steele telling an RNC fundraiser that the war in Afghanistan is “a war of Obama’s choosing” that the American public doesn’t want. Worse, Steele implied that the U.S. is doomed to lose it—saying that any “student of history” could tell you that “the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan.” Steele, of course, is factually incorrect—it was President Bush who declared war on Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks. More importantly, Steele’s anti-war sentiments put him “at odds with about 100 percent of the Republican Party,” which has called for extending the war beyond Obama’s one-year time line. It’s time for Steele to resign.

Republicans are in a bind, said Earl Hutchinson in HuffingtonPost.com. The GOP knows the gaffe-prone Steele is “not fit to head the RNC,” but it can’t get rid of him “for the very reason he was plucked for the lead role in the first place.” As a rare black Republican, Steele was chosen to disguise the fact that the GOP has become an insular party of white, extremely conservative, blue-collar voters from the South. But keeping him carries its own risks, said Rick Klein in ABCnews.com. With the November elections looming, party officials have already “given up trying to coordinate election planning or policy proposals through Steele’s RNC.” Even if he shuts his mouth for the next five months, Steele has already fragmented and weakened the GOP just as it prepares for battle.

Actually, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com, Steele’s gaffe may end up damaging Democrats more than Republicans. As soon as his Afghanistan comment came to light, the Democrats rushed out a statement condemning Steele for “betting against our troops and rooting for failure in Afghanistan.” If this attack on Steele’s patriotism sounds familiar, it is because it’s an obvious echo of the Right’s attacks during the Bush years on anyone who questioned the war strategy in Iraq or Afghanistan. With prospects in Afghanistan looking glum indeed, Democrats may well regret insisting that those who want to bring our troops home are spineless traitors.