Steve Schmidt and McCain Are Wrong About Palin in 2008

Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist for the 2008 McCain campaign, is widely known to have had differences with the Palin camp during last year's fall campaign. As it became clear after the final debate that McCain, lacking resources, with bad economic news, and the Obama campaign in prevent defense with a significant lead, was going to lose, some dirty laundry became public. The McCain camp found Palin a slow study getting up to speed, resented what they interpreted as diva behavior, disliked her publicly questioning campaign tactics (e.g., robocalls and withdrawing from Michigan) and suspected by the end of the campaign, she was already trying to set herself up for the future. It's quite clear, just from the title of her forthcoming book, Going Rogue, that Palin felt that the McCain campaign was mishandling her, and I do believe her hubris was based, in part, on observing the obvious fact that she was pulling bigger crowds than McCain himself, and from her perception that the campaign was being run by the same type establishment campaigners she had gone through in her improbable path to the Alaska governor's mansion in 2006. I suspect that Schmidt will be a scapegoat in the Palin book, but did you really expect the Sarah Palin of Troopergate to rise above pettiness? She seems to have forgotten her real adversaries are the liberal Democrats, not fellow conservatives and Republicans.

Schmidt has been widely quoted in acknowledging that Sarah Palin is a talented politician and could conceivably win the 2012 nomination, but would be wiped out in a general election campaign. I don't think that the speculation about the nomination is correct. One of the key reasons McCain won the 2008 nomination is because a plurality of Republicans considered him the most electable candidate against either major Democratic adversary. I've already specified a number of reasons why Palin will never win the nomination; she received the highest unfavorable rating of any VP candidate running over the past 30 years. She will never be able to explain away her unforced resignation (I think it had more to do with declining approval ratings, a deteriorating relationship with the Alaska legislature, and a tougher-than-expected reelection, which would undermine her national ambitions). I think we can expect Palin's use of earmarks, her business tax hikes, and her disingenuous representation on the Bridge to Nowhere, not to mention the way she was skirting around Alaska public record laws by using external Internet email accounts. I also don't think she'll be able to rope-a-dope her way through GOP debates, expecting the others to direct their fire at each other, allowing her to rise above the fray.

But however personally popular she is (which I think is probably based more on empathy with her being targeted for personal attacks by progressives), she has no real core constituency within the Republican Party, beyond a certain populist streak. For example, I think many social conservatives may be concerned about the compromises between Sarah Palin's political career and her special-needs child (not to mention an illegitimate grandchild); Mike Huckabee, a minister, seems to be a more natural preference. Business conservatives are more likely to be attracted to Mitt Romney. I think that Palin has burned her bridges with moderate and independent Republicans, and her anti-intellectualism doesn't fit well with McCain's brand of pragmatic conservatives...

I want to particularly focus on the following comments Schmidt made at the University of Arkansas:

There was huge excitement that transformed the race. I believe to this day that had she not been picked as a vice presidential candidate, we would have never been ahead, not for one second, not for one minute, not for one hour, not for one day.

Let's note for the record that McCain had a 4 percentage point lead over Obama in the July 28 USA Today/Gallup Poll, one month before the Palin selection. I think that Schmidt is simply echoing McCain here. He has to say that, but in hindsight it was a terrible choice from a big picture concept; McCain had been making experience a big issue in his match-up with Obama; over 70 years old and polls showing McCain's age was a consideration, he then picks a second-year governor without any federal experience or expertise in domestic and foreign policy. What message do you think that sends to others about the meaningfulness of McCain's record of over 20 years of military experience and 26 years in Congress? If he died of a heart attack his second day as President, Sarah Palin was the second best person to be President? Better than, say, America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, whom earned his wings under the fire of the worst terrorist attack in American history? Better than Mitt Romney, whom served as governor of a blue state (Massachusetts) with years of success in business management and a stellar performance organizing the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics? Schmidt helped pick a governor whom was facing a Troopergate investigation report being released down the home stretch of the election; could you really afford to play Russian roulette with the uncertain outcome of an ethics investigation?

I have no doubt that Palin drew large crowds, but that was mostly preaching to large choirs. Granted, I don't doubt that it helped draw more volunteers to the campaign, but maybe all that did was pad the margin of victory in red states. She drew the highest VP candidate negatives in the history of national campaign polling, and the choice hurt the McCain campaign needing to attract swing state moderates and independents. The choice of Sarah Palin was a key reason Colin Powell had in announcing his support of Barack Obama.

Palin did not invent Joe the Plumber. McCain did not need help in raising the danger of a progressive-controlled Congress and a progressive President with a blank check to change the American way of life. If conservatives needed Sarah Palin to choose between a progressive with less than a 10% ACU rating versus a pragmatic conservative with an 26-year voting record and an over 80% ACU rating, we have even bigger problems.