A GOP Turncoat Bites the Dust

Former McCain Strategist, Steve Schmidt

Is it just me or is Washington getting more like bad television every week? Watching Steve Schmidt last night on 60 Minutes, I thought for a moment I’d tuned onto a spinoff of West Wing: “The Dumb Republican Who Didn’t Get His Candidate to the West Wing.”

Everyone knows why 60 Minutes would consider yet another hit piece on Sarah Palin newsworthy. I mean she’s a born-again Christian, she decided to have a Down’s syndrome baby, she’s against gay marriage – she has to be stupid. Right? Right?

But what does Schmidt hope to accomplish with this “insider edition” of the McCain Campaign’s disastrous attempt to win the Presidency? Remember, he started this by floating anti-Palin rumors and going on Larry King Live with his “catastrophic” statement against her.

Here is the downside for Schmidt, as I see it. Before last night, 95 percent of the public had no idea that he was the guy who ran the most embarrassing Republican campaign in history. Weird Al Yankovich could have run against Barack Obama and won. So I am at a loss to understand why he would want to continue to trash Palin more than a year after the election.

Let me get this straight. Is Schmidt saying that as head of McCain Campaign day-to-day operations he didn’t properly vet Palin? Or is he saying that he knew the Governor was unqualified but didn’t say anything before McCain chose her? Or is it simply that he wasn’t loyal to McCain in the first place and wanted him to fail? Because I’m not buying his assertion that Palin was a last desperate choice over a bad burrito dinner.

Or … or could it be that Steve Schmidt, as an active proponent of gay marriage, finds himself at odds with the Governor’s core beliefs? Could it be that he is a caustic critic of conservative Christian ideology? Just who isn’t being honest here?

Whatever his answer – and it must be one or all of the above – Steve Schmidt has shown himself to be, at the very least, unethical and untrustworthy to any candidate that would seek his services in the future.

With his appearance on 60 Minutes, Schmidt will undoubtedly now do the obligatory talk show perp walk: Oprah, Larry King, and Ellen DeGeneres, then fade into “also-ran” history with a Scott McClellan jacket. But this is such good bad TV that I think I’ll write up a treatment and send it over to Viacom. I’ll pitch Richard Dreyfuss for the McCain roll; he can use the work.

Gee, do you think Catherine Zeta-Jones would look good in glasses?

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