Free Republic

From watching “Game Change,” this much is clear: (1) Steve Schmidt is an absolutely brilliant campaign strategist who gave Sen. John McCain the idea to put “Country First” (it had never occurred to the war hero); and (2) Nicolle Wallace is a demure, yet quietly ingenious, media savant who can handle any crisis. Oh, but wait: Mr. Schmidt ran one of the worst campaigns in the history of presidential elections, losing to a first-term senator from Illinois with no experience governing anything, and Ms. Wallace let the entire message of the McCain campaign be overrun by — “Saturday Night Live”?...

On the tail of Game Change‘s premiere on HBO, former McCain/Palin adviser Nicolle Wallace, prominently featured in the film, visited Rachel Maddow tonight to expand upon the lessons of the 2008 campaign, and made clear that she felt fairly guilty about working to make someone “fundamentally unprepared and unsuited for the job” the Vice President of the United States. Wallace noted that she was still in shock as to “how close we came to having somebody a heartbeat away from the presidency so fundamentally unprepared and unsuited for the job,” adding that, while she thought tossing around the term “PTSD”...

Nicolle Wallace, a former colleague of Sarah Palin, has become the latest senior Republican publicly to round on the darling of the Tea Party movement, saying that her opponents should avoid criticising her directly and let her expose her own multiple flaws. SNIP "She has very obvious deficiencies that will reveal themselves as the nominating contest gets closer," she told The Daily Telegraph, adding: "Let her shoot her moose or whatever the heck she does on her [television] show, it will all work out." SNIP "What's troubling is she has missed an opportunity to go beyond the platitudes and deepen...