How the Republican Party stopped dreaming about a permanent majority and learned to think like McCain strategist Steve Schmidt.
Sergeant Schmidt. The Artillery Shell. The Bullet.
Even in the hyper-competitive world of political media strategists--a line of work that tends to reward the studied deployment of affectation and outsized personality--Steve Schmidt, the tough-talking, shaven-headed, 37-year old former high school tight end from North Plainfield, New Jersey, who recently emerged from a scrum among John McCain's inner circle to become the head of day-to-day operations, arrived on the national stage trailing more colorful nicknames than most.
"He figured out pretty quickly that [a martial] reputation would work to his professional benefit," Dan Schnur, McCain's communications director in 2000, recently told me. "When he came on to the Schwarzenegger [2006 gubernatorial] campaign, I told his junior staffers: If you show up late to a meeting, Steve will waterboard you."
Schmidt's most recent promotion was announced on July 2. Campaign manager Rick Davis's duties were scaled back to fundraising, searching for a v.p., and making preparations for the national convention, while Schmidt was dispatched to the campaign's
The campaign clearly needed a take-no-shit disciplinarian to whip the operation--and the message--into shape after it failed to capitalize on a four-month head start in the general election. And in the news accounts that followed the switch, the relatively unknown Schmidt was defined mostly by his nicknames: Sergeant Schmidt, the Artillery Shell, the Bullet. Still, none of these stuck quite as firmly--or have raised more red flags among Democrats--as the epithet that now precedes his name more than any other: "Rove protégé."
The day after Schmidt's promotion, The New York Times reported that he had "worked closely with Rove" in the White House, where he served as deputy assistant to the president and counselor to the vice president after the '04 election, and cited "associates" saying a McCain victory in November would burnish Rove's legacy. Schmidt was also a sometime attendee of Rove's exclusive "breakfast club," where much of the communications strategy for Bush's re-election campaign was plotted out. And it was Rove who nicknamed him the Bullet.
Being labeled a Rove protégé summons all kinds of associations in the minds of American voters--chief among them, a fundamentally divisive political strategy geared toward mobilizing the base in the service of a socially conservative agenda. But that's not Schmidt. Mark McKinnon, the former Bush adman who opted to leave the McCain campaign rather than produce ads attacking Obama, calls Rove "a pure party guy. ... He uniquely understands the history and physics of the Republican Party," whereas Schmidt is "a pure message machine. He came up as a professional through the press side of the business." John Weaver, a former top adviser to McCain, was less circumspect, "Steve's no more a Karl Rove protégé than I run the
Schmidt has certainly indulged in lowly Rove-like tactics over the years. Like the time, back in 1996, when he sent out 60,000 "sex surveys" that attempted to portray then-Congressman Tim Roemer as someone who was using health surveys to pry into the sex lives of adolescents. Schmidt has already proved in this campaign that he's not above that kind of behavior. But he also has a parallel history of stressing decidedly moderate positions, and eschewing the dictates of Rove's permanent conservative majority pipe dream. If his sudden ascendancy proves anything, it is that the Republican Party's fortunes have changed so dramatically that it can no longer afford to have grand ideologues run its campaigns, but must instead turn to scrappier tacticians like Schmidt.
Schmidt was tasked with carrying out a directive posted to Wallace's office door--"It's the Hypocrisy, Stupid"--that carried a decidedly more negative bent than the famous Carville adage. And when Kerry slipped--as when he tortuously explained that he "actually did vote for the $87 billion before [he] voted against it"--Schmidt immediately blasted out hundreds of e-mail alerts to surrogates, the press, and also McKinnon, who would shape the talking point into a devastating television ad.
When Schmidt came on, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was a chastened man. Two months earlier, he had tried to ram through a package of ballot initiatives that
Schmidt counts the campaign as one of the highlights of his career, and one reason might be that his personal politics, as colleagues suggest, overlap with Schwarzenegger's. Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for the
Weaver describes Schmidt as "hardly a right-wing reactionary guy" and counts him among a corps of Republican operatives in their late 30s and early 40s--most of whom have served in the Bush White House--who hope to chart a less divisive course for the party in the coming years. Still, there's been no indication that Schmidt, whom Mark McKinnon swears is a "total marshmallow ... [and] a really sweet guy," struggles with separating his personal politics from the task at hand.
Back in '04, for instance, Schmidt told an L.A. Times reporter that "every American, including the president ... believes John Kerry's service in
Hypocritical? Sure. But it isn't Steve Schmidt's job to be consistent from one election year to the next. And in late 2006, as Republicans who'd taken note of the work he'd done on Schwarzenegger's campaign were gearing up for the '08 election, Schmidt pretty much had his pick.
Continue>>
No comments:
Post a Comment