In 2006, I was really pulling for Michael Steele in his battle to win a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland. Unfortunately, Ben Cardin won and Steele wound up running the Republican National Committee. Steele’s odd remarks about the war in Afghanistan have led to a growing number of calls for his resignation among prominent conservatives. The war in Afghanistan was definitely not a war of President Barack Obama’s choosing, as Steele suggested in his remarks at a Connecticut fundraiser. This factual inaccuracy made the rest of Steele’s comments seem off-the-wall, but it appears as though he was trying to challenge the president’s strategy for prosecuting the war. He just failed miserably:

Well if he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan. Alright? Because everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan without committing more troops.

To an extent, Steele is right: historically, Afghanistan is where great powers go to die. Some conservatives view the current strategy for the war in Afghanistan as fundamentally flawed–myself included. Our political objectives in Afghanistan are unclear and it is unlikely that we have the long-term political will to stay in Afghanistan for the time that’s required, nor the will to allocate the requisite number of troops. George Will wrote a great op-ed last year in which he argued that airpower, rather than land power, may be sufficient to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan. Steele, however, failed to present clearly a viable alternative to a land-based, counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy for Afghanistan. His hollow critique lacked credibility because of his factually inaccurate statement about the genesis of the war. Conservatives are split on the issue of Afghanistan and the Steele flap highlights this division. At face value, the conservative uproar is focused on Steele’s bogus suggestion that America elected to fight this war, unprompted. The real issue is the division on strategy among conservatives. Because Steele did such a poor job of communicating this alternative viewpoint, this division remains largely unexplored.

Very simply, the RNC needs a chairman who can raise lots of money and who can present clear, and viable policy alternatives to the current administration. The RNC chairman doesn’t need to be a foreign policy expert, but he/she needs to present his/her ideas in a clear and unambiguous manner. Steele has been unable to do this on several occasions.

What I care about most are the November elections. Right now, conservatives are tracking to make impressive gains in the House and Senate. The Democrats in Congress and the Obama administration are imploding politically. Their liberal ideology is simply incompatible with an electorate that is, at the end of the day, center-right. So while Steele is an imperfect chairman, selecting at a new high-profile chairman at this time could become an unnecessary distraction from November. Every minute spent on Michael Steele is less time that’s spent thinking about how to win in November. Steele’s definitely no Lee Atwater or Haley Barbour, but I don’t have any better suggestions at the moment. Mitt Romney is an outstanding administrator and would do well, but the legacy of his government health care program in Massachusetts would render his opposition to nationalized medicine impotent. Plus, he would probably view the gig as a demotion–going from serious presidential candidate to party chairman. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Part of me thinks that Romney could be a powerhouse at the helm of the RNC. I’m just not sure how he would be able to handle the health care issue. This is the same issue that could potential hobble his 2012 ambitions.