One of the reasons I had so many reservations about Mitt Romney is that I feared, being an establishment moderate, he would run the kind of gentlemanly loser campaign that John McCain ran in 2008. With the exception of picking Sarah Palin as the running mate, McCain’s campaign did everything wrong. And it even managed to mismanage that one success: after Palin’s firebrand acceptance speech - the one that propelled McCain ahead of Obama in the polls (for the first time in months) - the McCain campaign hid her away but did nothing to prepare her while she was sequestered. The architect of that defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory debacle was the bullet-headed Steve Schmidt.
For this reason, I was much interested in this expose article on Schmidt at Big Journalism. A very informative article that deserves to be read in its entirety.
For some background information, check out Schmidt’s wikipedia entry. This is what it says about his early campaigns:
In 1995, Steve Schmidt managed the unsuccessful campaign for Kentucky Attorney General of Will T. Scott, who is now Deputy Chief Justice of the Kentucky Supreme Court [in other words Scott was good, his 1995 campaign run by Schmidt just sucked]. This Kentucky campaign's advertising strategy was featured in the second edition of George Magazine. In 1998, Schmidt ran California State Senator Tim Leslie's unsuccessful race for Lt. Governor of California. Also that year, he was the Communications Director for California State Treasurer Matt Fong's unsuccessful campaign to unseat U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer [I remember this campaign; Fong was widely viewed as having a credible shot at unseating Boxer]. In 1999, he was the Communications Director for Lamar Alexander's presidential run, leaving in June when the campaign reduced its senior staff.
You will notice that the two things common with each campaign: Steve Schmidt, and the fact that his employer lost. While it is true that he led Arnold’s 2006 successful gubernatorial campaign, this was accomplished when Arnold was at the apogee of his popularity. As far as I am able to determine, this has been Schmidt’s only campaign victory - ever.
I agree with Moe Lane, who said:
The faction of Team McCain represented by Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a Republican Presidential campaign for the rest of their lives.
Hear, hear. Steve Schmidt is the John Tory of American politics.