Was Steve Schmidt Qualified to Be McCain's Campaign Manager? (Hell no! How not to win 101)

In a recent article at the National Review, John McCain’s failed 2008 campaign manager Steve Schmidt is quoted as saying “it will be a very long time before questions about capability and preparedness are not a part of the process.” The implication is that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was neither “prepared” nor “capable” to be vice president in the 2008 cycle, and that now hangs over the current vice presidential selection process.

Money shot on Schmidt's incompetence and why he's only doing gigs on MSNBC.

In short, Schmidt was in control of the political and messaging operations of the campaign. Two messaging strategies proved to be costly for the McCain campaign—the handling of both McCain and Palin in general and the error of suspending the campaign in the midst of the financial crisis. The campaign was criticized for waiting nearly two weeks between Governor Palin’s introduction as the VP pick and her first interview with Charlie Gibson.

E-mails of Governor Palin’s obtained by the Anchorage Daily News in January of 2009 noted that prior to being selected as the VP candidate, Governor Palin was slated to give interviews to Newsweek, NPR, Fox News and a host of other outlets at the RNC convention as a McCain campaign surrogate. Yet after she was picked as VP, she was silenced and kept from the media.

This poor campaign messaging approach and shackling of the personable Palin allowed the biased media—including the likes of Tina Fey—to set the tone and narrative of the debate over Palin. Thus, much of the public to this day believe Fey’s words about the proximity of Palin’s home to Russia were instead Palin’s words. The media drove the campaign to be defensive and incoherent rather than assertive and clear.

A third messaging strategy sprouted from the failures of the first two. Leaked memos from the waning days of the McCain campaign indicated that Schmidt and his buddies aimed to protect Schmidt’s reputation in the impending electoral loss. These memos and Schmidt’s desire to deflect blame likely provided the impetus for the anonymous lies spread about Governor Palin’s geographic knowledge following the campaign. The strategy from the leaked memos included reaching out to “influential reporters.” One of these reporters included Game Change co-author Mark Halperin.

Fast forward to 2012, and Schmidt is still attempting to save face by projecting his failures as an incapable strategist onto the Vice Presidential candidate he helped choose and who provided the only spark in an otherwise exceedingly dull campaign. This is why Schmidt played an admitted instrumental role as one of the sources for Halperin’s book and in the HBO adaptation of the book, which fallaciously disparaged Palin while painting a sympathetic image of Schmidt. (Note from KOLATH: this is one of the reasons why Schmidt sent Palin out to two AMBUSH interviews....Couric and Gibson...so Schmidt can keep in the good graces of the MSM. He knows who "butters his bread" in DC)

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