The Schmidt's hit the fan for the Lincoln Project and #NeverTrump GOP.
The glue that held together a movement that was against a president is now gone after he has left. It's no surprise they are turning on each other.
As the primary election season for the 2022 midterms heats up, the#NeverTrump movement that began in 2016 is experiencing an embarrassing squabble that overshadows its efforts to present an alternative to the rightward drift of the Republican Party. Mind you, this is mostly smoke and mirrors; the GOP that they are trying to save fell apart in 2008 as it spent America into war and recession. Most of the members of this tendency were neoconservative technocrats like David Frum or old hands within the world of right-wing media like columnist Stephen Hayes.
Of the elected Republicans, Senator John McCain was perhaps the most significant figure that clashed with Trump beyond the 2016 election, and his staff played a pivotal role in passing along the infamous Steele Dossier to the FBI. Much of McCain’s former staff from his 2008 presidential campaign also coalesced within the #NeverTrump movement, including the day-to-day chief of the campaign, Steve Schmidt. He was among the founders of the Lincoln Project in 2019, along with his predecessor John Weaver. In 2021 in the wake of revelations that Weaver was a serial sexual harasser of younger male coworkers several Lincoln Project higher ups were forced to leave the organization under scandal having acted slowly to remove him from it. When this came out Meghan McCain made a point to pour gasoline on the fire with a tweet claiming that her father had despised both Weaver and Schmidt.
Apparently bad blood had existed for several years between Schmidt and the McCain family, as well as some of his colleagues like the official campaign manager Rick Davis. This past week Schmidt unloaded both on Twitter and on podcasts with Politico’s Ryan Lizza and CNN’s Brian Stelter on the McCains and many of his erstwhile colleagues. I managed to listen to both of these interviews, and needless to say that while Schmidt may have come clean about lying for McCain in the past, he seems to think that lying for his own sake is the way to make up for it.
The job that Schmidt had performed on the McCain campaign within the professional world of campaign politics should have been enough in a normal year to earn him seat among the top pundits of campaign politics. This is the artificial world where media members quiz these wise men of the bus tours through hard hat areas not about what policies are best for Americans, but what plays well in a given state. Among those that made the leap from campaign manager to media hot-shot are James Carville, Karl Rove, David Axelrod, and to a certain extent Steve Bannon. But for those that run failed campaigns, especially catastrophic ones, often obscurity is their sad fate. No one wanted to hear from Mitt Romney’s senior campaign personnel like Stuart Stevens or Matt Rhoades after 2012, because everyone knows that his campaign was roadkill. The McCain-Palin 2008 campaign enjoys similar ignominy. The “horse race journalism” spawned by the often confidential relationships between reporters and political advisors has attracted the criticism of media analysts for its effects of distilling politics into personality contests rather than policy debates. Schmidt himself condemned “access journalism” in the interviews for the state of American politics, even though it was this exact type of relationship that earned him fame in Game Change (see below).
In the interviews and his own Substack article Schmidt made two major admissions (if he is to be believed):
That he had unwittingly deceived the media by issuing a blanket denial of an alleged affair between McCain and a female lobbyist for a firm with a foreign government client, which later McCain admitted was true.
That he had not voted for McCain in 2008.
While many drama addicts and Meghan McCain haters were quick to lap up his “revelations”, it’s important to take them with an Arizona-sized grain of salt. Anytime a person admits that he unwittingly lied to the media, but kept that lie secret well beyond the stage that he discovered the truth or that it ceased to matter, it’s fair to question whether this is just someone seeking attention. Furthermore, Schmidt’s admission about not voting for McCain comes several years after colleague Nicolle Wallace admitted the same. She has in turn used her access to dirt on the McCain campaign to promote her own career to the point that she now anchors a show on MSNBC. In 2010 she exclaimed “heaven forbid” that Palin becomes president, and since then has embraced the role of media celebrity. The world has conveniently forgotten her multiple roles in the Bush White House that lied America into the Iraq War.
Speaking ill of the dead
One useful question is why now? Trump hating self-described conservatives had been in high demand during his presidency on MSNBC and Schmidt was no different having joined them in order to help present the facade of a big tent coalition of Americans including “decent” Republicans arrayed against the White House. But beneath the veneer of respectability he has always been just as vulgar and uncultured as any person that he has defamed among Trump’s camp. And it’s not as if this is new. In 2019 he was the co-host of a podcast known as Words Matter with Elise Jordan and Adam Levine, when they asked him on one episode questions about his connections to Howard Schultz’s exploratory presidential campaign bid. The conversation got on his nerves so badly that he walked off the show calling the questions “bullshit” and would leave the podcast permanently. According to The Daily Beast he proceeded to threaten to sue the studio if the interview aired.
That interview uncovered the true character not only of Schmidt but of the entire constellation of failures that makes up the #NeverTrump movement. For if there is anything more pathetic than being a blind fanatic for a cause, it’s being an obsessed and disingenuous hater of that same cause. The movement was never for anything, so it always has required personalities that it defends of icons of what they think conservatism really is. People like John McCain that in the #NeverTrump world was above criticism to the extent that attacking him was a sign of disloyalty to the United States. And Steve Schmidt was once that type of person, including once exclaiming that Donald Trump was “unworthy” of saying McCain’s name.
Narrative Change
The reasons for Schmidt’s decision to turn on the McCain family are probably related to having had to carry the albatross for fourteen years of being deeply involved in selecting Sarah Palin as running mate. In both the Politico and CNN interviews he attempted to sweep under the rug his role in this crucial episode of the 2008 campaign. He predictably does this by shifting blame to other figures from that campaign who, while they were incompetent in their own right, certainly had less of a hand in the failure than he did.
Who made the call to select Palin?
He told Stelter that McCain had asked him to sit in on his first meeting with Palin, which Schmidt refused to do on the grounds that it was “completely inappropriate” and McCain had to make the decision to select her himself.
This does not match with the account of John Heilemann, the co-author of Game Change when asked by Anderson Cooper in 2010 whether Schmidt and other McCain aides had regrets over the selection of Palin. “A lot of them will go to their graves knowing that they did something that was irresponsible,” he said after explaining that it was one of many desperate gambits that were taken by Schmidt and colleagues during the 2008 race in the face of an almost hopeless electoral outlook. Game Change would go on to be adapted into a 2012 HBO movie starring Julianne Moore as Palin and Woody Harrelson as Schmidt. Schmidt had been a key source for Heilemann and Halperin in the book, and basked in the attention that he gained from it and the movie. The film was objectively well made and the ensemble cast, in particular Harrelson and Moore who played so well as adversaries, won multiple prizes at the Golden Globes and Emmy’s.
In a 2012 interview about the movie, Schmidt claimed that the film was “very accurate”, meaning that he did not dispute the notion that he had been the instrumental person in the selection of Palin. In one of the last scenes of the movie (above) he is portrayed apologizing to McCain (Ed Harris) for “suggesting” her. In an earlier clip he gets into a verbal shouting match with McCain speechwriter Mark Salter who had serious misgivings about selecting Palin. Does this jibe with his rendition of events recently in the podcasts where he claims that earlier in the campaign he told McCain to “go f— yourself” when he admitted to his affair with the lobbyist?
Absurdly misstated Russia connections
The events in question all happened in 2008, so why are they relevant today? In those times Schmidt was a spin doctor and campaign manager for the Republican candidate during an election year in which the economy was melting down and the nation was embroiled in an unjustified war under the watch of his party’s president. Today Schmidt is self-identifying as a Democrat supporting President Biden as the economy is on the cusp of another major recession and the nation is involved in the costly funding of a new war in Ukraine and several others in the Middle East. He blamed McCain’s reckless personal life and the inclusion of Rick Davis on the campaign in the position of vetting Palin for a mistake that until then he had acknowledged was his.
Why pick on Davis? Because he had once been a partner with Paul Manafort in a firm that did political campaign work for Viktor Yanukovych, a Ukrainian political figure considered to be pro-Russian. Schmidt has used this tenuous link between Palin and McCain, then McCain and Davis, and finally Davis and pro-Russia Ukrainians to cast aspersions on the senator for looking the other way on Russian infiltration of the American political system. But of all the mistakes in the 2008 race, this was one that McCain did address when he nixed the convention manager role for Paul Manafort according to The Atlantic. Davis’s association with Manafort may have been questionable, but it was never illegal. Manafort’s own work on behalf of Yanukovych was not in and of itself illegal either, albeit the income he had earned from the work was lobbied into the US through a series of intermediaries in order to avoid taxes. What helped bury him was his failure to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act until after the 2016 campaign.
Here another glaring contradiction emerges: Palin in 2008 had if anything been criticized for being too wary of the Russian threat, to the extent that she was lampooned for it in one of the most famous Saturday Night Live political sketches of all time. Schmidt’s new pivot on McCain’s tolerance of pro-Putin lobbyists like Davis only makes sense if one assumes that they were at the same time willing to have a VP who was ardently anti-Russia and viewed it as a threat to her home state.
Whether through reading his newsletter or listening to interviews, it isn’t hard to find holes in Schmidt’s story. He was a terrible advisor to McCain whose selection of Palin was, as Heilemann accurately characterized it, a stab in the dark by a strategist who knew he was fighting for a lost cause. Whereas for fourteen years he characterized Palin as an ignorant lunatic in contrast to the steady McCain, he now says (to Stelter) that McCain was no less crazy and dysfunctional.
In the clip below Steve Schmidt justifies the choice of Sarah Palin as running mate and claims credit for it. “We knew that it was a political risk. . . but we knew that the challenge was so great that we had to take that political risk”.
Schmidt and his ilk always said that it was you that was in the cult, with your MAGA cap and #COVFEFE mug. OK, let’s be honest, I too have believed that Trump followers often give the Orange One way too much slack given his fast-tracking of potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals, intervention overseas in Syria, and complicity in the continuing persecution of Julian Assange. But media reports of voters’ fealty to Donald Trump underestimate their capacity to say “no” to certain choices of his. This past Tuesday there was a GOP primary in Pennsylvania in which Trump’s pick Dr. Mehmet Oz still days later has not sealed a win against multiple rivals including the upstart Kathy Barnette. So the media has taken to labelling her “Ultra-MAGA” because now just being a Trump endorsed candidate is not enough for them.
One further reason for his surly attitude of late could be the return of Sarah Palin to politics. Since the abortive campaign he has spared no chance to take aim at her for being ignorant and unprepared. There is no doubt that in that election she was woefully unprepared and a terrible choice to be selected especially on such short notice. But now in 2022 she has returned from the political wilderness and stands a serious chance of being elected this year to fill Alaska’s vacant US House seat. Whatever her flaws were in 2008, she has emerged a survivor while Schmidt has spun off into a self-righteous alternate universe that surpasses her own meltdowns in 2008.