Word: schmidts
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...Steve Schmidt, John McCain's bald-headed message maven, made his first mark on national politics in the Bush-Cheney war room in 2004. Schmidt specialized in the generous dispersal of indignation - like a friendly neighbor handing out Halloween candy - to a quote-hungry press. "It is simply outrageous that John Kerry is questioning people's patriotism," he told the New York Times in April of that year. "John Kerry will say anything for his political benefit," he told Reuters that October. "Now his campaign surrogates have taken those attacks to a new low," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer that...
...heat of a campaign, Schmidt understood that outrage could cut through the news clutter like a buzz saw. It didn't matter much if the outrage was fueled by fact - better if it was fueled by emotion, which would tweak the fury of his base, leading to exciting exchanges on cable television and fresh chatter around the watercooler. Unlike health care or foreign policy, the emotional charge of outrage has a magnetic effect; voters are forced to take sides and respond, shifting the debate...
...four years later, Schmidt and the McCain campaign have returned to outrage, and there is little doubt that the tactic is again having the desired effect. Two weeks ago, the McCain campaign crowed about the alleged mistreatment that the press and the Barack Obama campaign were heaping on Alaska governor Sarah Palin (at roughly the same time that the campaign sent out e-mail blasts featuring enthusiastic media blurbs of Palin's convention speech). After the convention, the indignation only intensified; in the course of 24 hours, McCain accused Obama of supporting "sex education" for kindergarten students and referring...
...past week, the campaign has written off much of the skepticism about the qualifications of vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin as the reaction of a biased media establishment out of touch with real Americans. "She's not part of the Washington, D.C., cocktail circuit," Steve Schmidt, one of McCain's senior advisers, told TIME. "Elite opinion looks down with contempt at people who are not part of their world." Left unmentioned was the fact that McCain himself has been an A-list member of the Washington élite since he arrived in the capital more than 30 years...
...lose supporters to the upstart Die Linke (The Left), a party made up of former east German communists and disaffected leftists from the west of the country. According to the latest polls, just 21% of Germans now say they would vote for the party of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt if an election were held tomorrow (compared to 37% for Merkel's CDU and 14% for Die Linke). For the past twelve months, the party's top brass had tried to stem those losses by moving the party's policies to the left...