Steve Schmidt is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans./submitted
Opinion: Lincoln Project founder Steve Schmidt raises lots of questions about former Sen. John McCain and family but answers one definitively – about himself.
By Phil Boas | Arizona Republic
Steve Schmidt frequently gets the urge to purge himself in public and last weekend was at it again, power-spraying words at the late Sen. John McCain and his surviving family members.
Schmidt is one of the professional smart asses who created the Lincoln Project, a twice disgraced super-PAC made up of former Republican operatives. Lincoln Project convinced liberals to pay them millions to bring their gum-snapping, sophomoric wisecracks to the campaign against Donald Trump.
As you would expect, the Lincoln boys are glib. They’re slick. But their most ascending feature is their vanity – a dirigible of self-delusion. They actually believed they were saving Democracy, no small ambition for work-a-day hacks who had until then been greasing the skids of American politics.
Try to understand.
If you were lost in a crowd of greaseballs who run political campaigns, you might do as Steve Schmidt did in 2018 and aspire to something more dignified. Schmidt announced he was leaving the “corrupt” and “immoral” Republican Party for the “only party left in America that stands for what is right and decent and remains fidelitous to our Republic.”
Schmidt wanted to be the victim in a morality tale
If that sounds a little 17th century, it’s because Schmidt’s Twitter posts are, as New York Magazine described it, “marked by the melodramatic and grandiose style … thick with weighty pronouncements about truth and honor.”
On Sunday, truth and honor called Schmidt to drop anchor at Substack and heave overboard the skeletons he’d been saving from the 2008 McCain presidential campaign.
As one who has switched sides and is now a creature of the left, Schmidt could not simply be the tragic figure in his morality tale. He had to be its victim.
“This is a story about lying. Public lying. It is a story about Senator John McCain’s lying, and the damage it has done to many people, including me. It is also a story about my lying because, ultimately, John McCain’s lie became mine.”
Steve Schmidt
