I had never met Steve Schmidt and only knew him through the media. When I found myself seated at the former McCain campaign manager's table at a Washington dinner hosted by The Week magazine, it was like a flashback to the 2008 campaign. Schmidt is instantly recognizable with his trademark shaved head, his bulldog physique, and the restless intensity that marks him as a political operative of the first order.
He had spent 10 weeks trying to mold Sarah Palin into a plausible national candidate, and when the campaign ended, he assessed her shortcomings, as she did his, in what turned into a volley of unusually blunt words. "You paid a price for all that candor," I suggested across the table. "Not really," he scoffed with a laugh, explaining that he lives and works in northern California, which offers geographic and cultural distance from the battles that animate Washington politics.
He was in town Tuesday evening to give his perspective on a bipartisan panel titled "Battle for the Soul of a Party," which is what passes for entertainment at ground zero of the partisan divide. Before he took the stage, he said his problem with Palin had to do with her saying things that are untrue, which caused problems for the campaign. It's a practice you could say she has since perfected with the "death panels" of last summer, and continues today with an assertion made in Louisville, Ky., last week that the Founding Fathers really didn't want separation of church and state.
Schmidt gives Palin her due as a political talent. He has said that without her on the ticket, McCain's margin of defeat would have been even greater. But she is a divisive figure: "dark," he said to me, "us versus them, and she's inciting regional divisions, which we haven't seen in this country for a long time." Her Fox News show, Real American Stories, draws 2 million viewers, standard fare for its Thursday-evening time slot on the Fox News Channel, respectable but nothing to write home about.
But the hyperattention paid to every Palin utterance, not only by Fox, inflates her importance, and makes a fringe group of disgruntled antitaxers seem like a movement ready to storm the Capitol. Schmidt disappointed the audience of media types when he declined to pile on Palin. He's already said it would be "catastrophic" if she were the Republican nominee in 2012. He's not happy with Republicans reading people out of the party for lack of ideological purity, a view enshrined by Louisiana Sen. David Vitter's declaration that he'd rather have 30 Republicans with strong conservative beliefs than 60 compromisers. "Good for him," said Schmidt, "but that's not a winning or a wise electoral strategy."
Schmidt quoted a former Republican Party chair, from the pre-Palin heyday, who said there are two types of churches—one where members hunt for heretics to kick them out, the other where people go out looking for converts to bring them in. "If we're a political party that goes out hunting for heretics, that's not a strategically sound premise," Schmidt said, adding with a mischievous grin, "I haven't gotten kicked out yet."
That's a good sign considering his open defiance of party tenets, from Palin worship to gay marriage, which he endorsed in a speech before the Log Cabin Republicans a year ago, warning that the GOP was in danger of becoming a religious party. He reminded the dinner crowd at Washington's newly remodeled W Hotel that the Republican Party was strongest when it could accommodate people with a range of views. In that long-lost era, staunch conservatives, such as Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, coexisted with New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman, who was pro-choice and served briefly as President Bush's EPA director, until she was marginalized and forced out.
Republicans should be advocating pro-growth economic policies, Schmidt said. So should Democrats, for that matter. And politicians should talk about things that matter to people's lives, like how do we navigate the future with a rising China? "Conservatism accomplished a lot of its goals in the latter part of the 20th century," he said. "What does 21st-century conservatism look like?
There to avoid the question and to fill the air with bromides was Minority Whip Eric Cantor, fresh from endorsing Marco Rubio for the Senate in Florida over Charlie Crist, a no-brainer considering Rubio is 20 points ahead and the likely winner of the August primary. Cantor burbled something about the country being at a crossroads and needing a new kind of leadership and how Crist had embraced the stimulus bill, blah, blah, blah. Schmidt isn't running for office, and maybe the advice he dishes out falls on deaf ears in today's GOP, but he's right about Palin and a GOP too enamored of her star appeal.
Eleanor Clift is also the author of Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics andFounding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment
© 2010
Like this comment by Steve Schmidt, "[T]here are two types of churches—one where members hunt for heretics to kick them out, the other where people go out looking for converts to bring them in. "If we're a political party that goes out hunting for heretics, that's not a strategically sound premise."
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