Steve Doesn't Know, um, Schmidt

By Baxter

So, Steve Schmidt has been in charge of the McCain campaign for — what, less than a month now? Let's take a fond look back on all that's happened since.

• Senator McCain, cornered on whether he supported insurance coverage for women's birth control equal to Viagra (as campaign surrogate Carly Fiorina had falsely averred), paused for an excruciating eight seconds until he finally admitted he couldn't answer the question. Republican strategist Ed Rollins called the resulting video the most awkward moment he'd seen in 40 years of politics.
• After Senator McCain declared Social Security "a disgrace," it was revealed that A), he doesn't understand how it works, and B), at age 71, he collects it.
• Anheuser-Busch was sold to the Belgian company InBev. The residents of Missouri — a key battleground state and home of the King of Beers — are breathlessly waiting to hear how much money Cindy McCain made from the sale. (Hint: A lot.)
  
• McCain adviser and multimillionaire Phil Gramm called us "a nation of whiners" and said hard economic times were all in our heads.
• Senator Obama made a smash-hit trip overseas, the least exciting moment of which occurred when he sank a three-point basket while visiting U.S. troops in Kuwait.
• Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki and the Bush Administration pulled the rug out from under Senator McCain's Iraq talking points by endorsing Senator Obama's withdrawal plan (Al-Maliki) or coming out for some kind of "time horizon" (Bush).
• The McCain campaign at first tried to compete with the visuals coming out of Senator Obama's trip by scheduling a visit to an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. They soon canceled, citing Hurricane Dolly, but the real reason was a giant oil slick that fouled the Mississippi River — and which would have uncomfortably highlighted the presumptive Republican nominee's recent flip-flop on offshore drilling.
• The McCain campaign openly sulked about the media attention Senator Obama was receiving and began calling him "The One."
• Senator McCain made a disastrous visit to a Bethlehem, Pennsylvania supermarket, spilling jars of applesauce and posing against a backdrop of — well, you know.
• Senator McCain repeatedly said that the Anbar Awakening happened after the so-called "surge" when it really happened before.
• Senator McCain had a growth removed from his face for a biopsy. (Okay, that's not Schmidt's fault, but still, it's just more of the same sad, sorry stuff that we're seeing from this campaign.)

In short, is this a Presidential campaign that's been fixed? Listen — our vet did a better job fixing us. We think that Steve Schmidt is Exhibit A for a familiar political argument — that Republicans aren't smarter. They've just always had a lot more money.

Oh — we forgot one thing. The McCain campaign did come out with a scurrilous T.V. ad claiming that Senator Obama snubbed wounded troops on his trip — when it was the Pentagon that canceled the visit. How truly Rovian of them.

See "Exhibit A," above. Except of course now we're the ones with more money.