Steve Schmidt Throws In His Lot With The Long Arc Of History

Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain's campaign (some would say into the ground) last year, is prepared to call for the GOP to drop their opposition to gay marriage.

Former top McCain adviser Steve Schmidt is planning to use a Friday speech to the Log Cabin Republicans to urge the GOP to drop its opposition to same-sex marriage.

"I'm confident American public opinion will continue to move on the question toward majority support, and sooner or later the Republican Party will catch up to it," Schmidt plans to say according to excerpts provided to ABC News.

Schmidt's push for Republicans to endorse same-sex marriage comes as his party is grappling with a string of gay rights victories in Iowa, Vermont, and Washington, D.C.

The Republican Party is just trapped on this. Young people don't care about this issue and they isolate themselves from the next generation with every fundie-backed denunciation of loving relationships. But their base has become increasingly hostile and fever-pitched, and without the theocrats on the ground they have virtually no one willing to get out the vote for their candidates. They can't take this issue off the table, as much as the Steve Schmidts of the world would want it.

And anyway, Schmidt probably was helped into the light by virtue of his lesbian sister. That's what it typically takes for conservatives to recognize the world outside their cloistered view.

The Worst And The Dimmest

It was inevitable. Fresh off of trying to bust the Writer's Guild union, Chris Lehane is moving on from that "success" to where he's always wanted to be - safe in the arms of his Republican pals.

With no end in sight to the state's flurry of ballot initiatives and the state likely to hold a special election this year, top Republican adviser Steve Schmidt and Democratic strategist Chris Lehane are among several California heavyweights forming a new firm solely designed to work on ballot-box campaigns.

Schmidt ran Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election drive, while Lehane worked in the Clinton White House and defeated a GOP attempt to change California's electoral college system.

The new firm, LFM Campaigns, also will include:
-- Democratic consultant Ace Smith, who was Hillary Clinton's California presidential campaign chairman and serves as an adviser to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a potential gubernatorial candidate
-- Republican strategist Adam Mendelsohn, adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the governor's former communications director
-- Mark Fabiani, Lehane's longtime business partner and a former communications aide to President Clinton

"If you look at the history of proposition work, the ones that have been most successful from a strategic perspective are those that have crossed party lines or have been seen as bipartisan," Lehane said.

There's a Murderer's Row of willing stooges.

And people wonder why the state is perpetually in crisis. With consultants like these...

Think about the timing, too. Right now, when ballot-box budgeting is crippling the state with unworkable burdens and all energies should be focused on untangling the structural traps that make the state ungovernable, Lehane and co. happily flit around, taking corporate money for "bipartisan" ballot measures that will do precisely the opposite.

The sickest thing is that these are the people Democratic lawmakers still think it makes sense to listen to. California Democratic Party money has poured into their pockets. The consultant class of hired guns in Sacramento may be the biggest contributor to the permanent crisis mode in which we find ourselves. Hope that "bipartisan" cash satisfies you while the state burns, fellas.

CA Campaign 2010 Odds and Ends

Just because it's never too early to get a campaign fix, here are a few items that amused, exasperated and provoked me the past few days.

• Topline political commentators still have no idea what they're talking about concerning Barbara Boxer's race for Senate in 2010. Chris Cillizza seems to think that Boxer is vulnerable to a challenge by Arnold Schwarzenegger. First of all, her approval ratings are BETTER than Arnold's. Second, there's no way he can win a Republican primary after having advocated for tax increases. His positions on health care reform and global warming and Prop. 8 don't help either, but in particular the tax position is untenable in a closed Republican primary. Chuck DeVore would slaughter him in a straight-up one-on-one matchup. The Yacht Party isn't going to line up behind Schwarzenegger. It's just not going to happen. And Arnold knows it, which is why he won't run.

• As for Schwarzenegger's successor, the great hope of the Republican Party, former eBay executive Meg Whitman, has already lost top political operatives Steve Schmidt and Adam Mendelsohn before she's even announced for the position. FAIL. Although, given Schmidt's performance on John McCain's campaign, I'm not sure you want his help. I think it's important for Democrats to make Schmidt absolute poison for any California Republican seeking to hire him.

• Meanwhile, Jerry Brown, angling for the Governor's office for a third term, is getting fund-raising help from Gray Davis. See above re: poison.

• Glenn Greenwald has been tracking Dianne Feinstein's presumed backpedaling and vagueness regarding torture and forcing all branches of government to comply with the Army Field Manual on interrogations. This bears a lot of watching. Feinstein's equivocations and turnarounds against her constituents are so perfunctory now as to be banal, but if she thinks she can get away with wavering on torture and still try to win votes, she's just flat wrong.

• This article at Swing State Project posits that Obama won 4 Congressional districts in California currently held by Republicans - Gallegly (CA-24); Dreier (CA-26); Bono-Mack (CA-45); Bilbray (CA-50). He bases this on assumptions from the county-level data, assumptions which I'm not sure can be made. Anecdotally, I heard Obama carried CA-48, so if anything the diarist may be undercounting this. Once all the data is received, we'll have a full report, but I find this too speculative to be worthy of comment.

Steve Schmidt Orders His Own Personal Wahhhmbulance

This has to be the most pathetic conference call in the history of conference calls.

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

“Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” Schmidt told reporters.

But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.

The best part of this is the response comment from McCain HQ: "You are in the tank." Because if you don't give McCain's team the final cut on all your stories you might as well have written "Yes We Can" 1,000 times. Joe Klein 2.0 comments on this and tells the truth:

1. he's hoping to work the refs: if he complains enough about press bias, we mainstream sorts will cower, cringe and try to seek false equivalences between the two campaigns.

2. the more time we spend covering this nonsense, the less we'll spend on the real issues in this campaign.

Sorry, Steve. Not buying.

Well, mostly not buying. Ruth Marcus is down for a ride on the tire swing. But the WaPo editorial page is pretty pissed off, which is unusual.

Just calling a press conference to say "Stop calling me a liar!" instead of "I'll stop lying" is pathetic in and of itself. But it's even more so on a day when the McCain campaign releases their Obama's a straight-up Chi-town street hustler ad, and then asks for leniency from the press. Win or lose, they are really terrible human beings.

Off The Reservation

The McCain campaign is going to war today, trying to throw a hissy fit over the coverage of their VP pick, claiming that the librul media and the "angry left" (ah, what a joy to have that back in the lexicon) is being unrepentantly sexist in their reactions, turning Sarah Palin into a martyr. The conservative base, whipped into a frenzy over the selection, loves nothing more than being permanently aggrieved, the persecuted minority, and so this will play very well with them. So will attacking the press, which is a common tool in their toolkit. Joe Klein describes this fairly well, actually.

Steve Schmidt has decided, for tactical reasons, to slime the press. He wants the public to believe that there is an unfair--sexist (you gotta love it)--personal assault going on against Palin and her family. This is a smokescreen, intended to divert attention from the fact the very real and responsible vetting that is taking place in the media--about the substance of Palin's record as mayor and governor. Sure, there are a few outliers--and the tabloid press--who have fixed on baby stories. That was inevitable....the flip side of the personal stories that the McCain team thought would work to their advantage--Palin's moose-hunting and wolf-shooting, and her admirable decision to have a Down Syndrome baby. And yes, when we all fix on the same story, whether it's a hurricane or a little-known politician, a zoo ensues. But the media coverage of the Palin story has been well within the bounds of responsibility. Schmidt is trying to make it seem otherwise, a desperate tactic.

There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is "a task from God." The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.

The problem the McCain campaign is coming up against is that some of their minions are either uncomfortable with or unaware of the new talking points, leading to Meg Whitman calling the media reaction completely fair. And then there's this delightful bit of off-mike, off-message fun from none other than Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy.



The first rule of throwing a hissy fit is that everyone actually knows about it and stays on message. McCain's campaign is so erratic and flailing that they can't even pull off the one thing Republicans know how to do in their sleep.

Everything You Want To Know About The Decayed CA Democratic Consultant Class

Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani just got hired by the AMPTP, the coalition of the movie studios and networks, to help their PR during the WGA strike.

Make. Me. Sick.

So we have two of the go-to consultants for the California Democratic Party - the ones doing the top-level opposition to the Dirty Tricks initiative, for example - representing management in a labor fight, and not just any management, but one which is completely dishonest, and has earned the enmity of the entire blogosphere and arguably the entire country thanks to the excellent grassroots and netroots efforts of the writers. They've responded to union demands by trying to roll back the writer's residuals. They've lied from Day One about how little money they make off of product on the Internet. And they've openly attempted union busting tactics to stop the WGA juggernaut.

This is the lot that Lehane and Fabiani (and Schwarzenegger/Bush/Cheney hack Steve Schmidt!) have thrown in with.

Well this oughta be fun. Because we're about to see a battle for hearts and minds between Democratic Party insiders and the creative talent of the writing community.

If it was a boxing match, it'd be called before the first punch is thrown.

UPDATE: The interesting thing, of course, is that this comes at a time when talks are finally getting substantive, particularly with respect to union jurisdiction over the Internet and reality TV. That's quite astonishing to me, as it appeared to be the first thing the WGA was ready to give up early in the strike. This takes the model of getting the smaller things done first, and saving the big items, like residuals for content streamed online, for later.

But bringing in the masters of disaster suggests a very long, drawn-out fight, at least over that element.