McCain strategist endorses same-sex marriage

Schmidt urges GOP to be more welcoming of gays

Steve Schmidt, chief strategist for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign, came out in favor of marriage rights for same-sex couples in an interview with the Blade last week while urging the Republican Party to be more inclusive of gays and lesbians.

“I’m personally supportive of [marriage] equality for gay couples and I believe that it will happen over time,” he said. “I think that more and more Americans are insistent that, at a minimum, gay couples should be treated with respect and when they see a political party trying to stigmatize a group of people who are hardworking, who play by the rules, who raise decent families, they’re troubled by it.”

Schmidt is scheduled to appear at the Log Cabin Republicans’ annual convention, planned for next month in D.C.

In the wide-ranging, 50-minute Blade interview, Schmidt touched on how the Republican Party should address gay issues, decisions made during the presidential campaign and the future viability of some GOP politicians.

Since the election, Schmidt has taken a job as partner at Mercury Public Affairs, a public relations firm.

Schmidt said he “understand[s] the reality that people have objections to gay marriage,” but said he nonetheless supports marriage rights for gay couples.

A California resident, Schmidt said he voted against Proposition 8, which ended same-sex marriage in the Golden State. He said he believes marriage rights for gay couples will return through an initiative “that passes by popular vote within the next few years.”

His support for marriage rights for gay couples puts him in the minority within the Republican Party, but he said he still thinks the GOP should work to extend legal protections to gays, such as tax benefits for gay couples and non-discrimination protections for schoolteachers.

Schmidt, who has a lesbian sister, said his support of same-sex marriage has been shaped by the presence of a gay person in his family. Schmidt declined to disclose the identity of his lesbian sister, but said she accepted her sexual orientation and shared the news with family.

“I think one of the most tragic things in the world [is] when people are closeted and are denied their sexuality and this incredibly important part of their lives and the destructive potential of that action,” he said. “And I’ve come to believe over time that, as Dick Cheney said, freedom for everybody means freedom for everybody.”

But while Schmidt may have rejected Prop 8 at the ballot box, McCain officially supported the measure during the presidential campaign. Schmidt said he’s “never agreed 100 percent with any candidate” for whom he’s worked.

“It wasn’t my place in the campaign to debate issues with him that he had a firm opinion on,” Schmidt said. “But … as a voter, I’m not carrying my candidate’s proxy into the ballot box, I’m voting my conscience.”

Schmidt also worked on California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s (R) reelection campaign in 2006 and urged the governor to sign a bill that would have legalized same-sex marriage. The governor ultimately vetoed the bill.

When asked whether Schwarzenegger could have done more to fight Prop 8, Schmidt defended the governor, saying he was busy last year because many groups were looking to him for help in the election.

“If I [were] to offer free political advice to the gay community in California,” Schmidt said, “it would be don’t spend your time looking for people about why it was defeated, but instead focus on what you could do next time and get ready to run the next campaign, because they were very, very close to succeeding.”

Campaign comparisons

Schmidt also addressed the perception that gay issues like same-sex marriage weren’t prevalent in the 2008 campaign — at least in comparison to the 2004 campaign when the Federal Marriage Amendment factored heavily in the national dialogue.

Schmidt said the McCain campaign steered away from gay issues in part because McCain “has never been somebody who has used these divisive issues in his campaigns for office.” In 2006, McCain appeared in a television ad to urge the passage of an Arizona amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage and civil unions, but he was not seeking re-election to the U.S. Senate that year.

The economic crisis also dominated the debate during last year’s election, so social issues were put to the side, Schmidt said. But the focus on economic issues proved to be a detriment to the campaign, he said.

“Once the economy collapsed, we had a very, very difficult task and in fact it turned out to be impossible,” he said. “The day that Lehman Brothers collapsed, the McCain campaign was still roughly three points ahead, but that moment forward, [it] never went back into the lead.”

He said the Obama campaign “was built on a strategic premise that was right from Day One, which was the country wanted change” and something different than the Republican administration.

Schmidt said the McCain campaign never felt any pressure from social conservative groups to address LGBT issues more prominently in the campaign. He also said no constituency within the campaign was “trying to elevate these issues to the forefront of the campaign’s agenda.” He couldn’t immediately recall if there were any memoranda circulating on how campaign members should address LGBT issues.

But he said comparing the 2008 campaign to the 2004 campaign, when then-President George W. Bush and Karl Rove hammered the Federal Marriage Amendment and marriage amendments proposed in many states, would be an unfair comparison. Schmidt had a role in Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as Rove’s deputy.

“The fact that there were so many ballot initiatives taking place in states that were of critical importance in the presidential election forced the issue into the presidential campaign in 2004,” he said. “So I think the circumstances of the debate changed very dramatically in 2004 and 2008. I think it’s an apples-and-oranges comparison.”

Schmidt said there would have been “little difference” on how McCain would have acted on LGBT issues if he were elected to the White House instead of Obama, noting that both candidates oppose same-sex marriage.

As far as other issues, Schmidt said he thinks McCain would have “taken decisive action and fixed the banking crisis in the country,” which he said Obama “has been pretty ineffective on.”

‘No negative reaction’ to McCain’s Blade Q&A

In a noteworthy development, McCain granted a written Q&A interview to the Blade during the general election campaign. The interview, published in October, marked the first time that a Republican presidential nominee has granted an interview to the gay press.

Despite the significance of the interview, Schmidt said “there were not deliberations” within the campaign about whether McCain should participate.

“The interview request came in and the interview request was fulfilled,” he said. Schmidt said, “there was certainly no negative reaction” after the interview was published.

He declined to comment on whether McCain penned the responses to the e-mail interview himself and said he didn’t know whether Log Cabin had any input into the responses.

Schmidt also made an appearance last year at a Log Cabin event at the Republican National Convention. At the time, the Advocate quoted him as telling Log Cabin attendees that their “organization is an important one in the fabric of our party.”

Schmidt told the Blade that it’s rare for a person working on a campaign to share their views publicly, but said he “exerted a prerogative to go speak to an important group of the Republican Party that I think has been historically underrepresented.”

“At the end of the day, it’s important that more and more gay people feel like they have a place in the Republican Party and the Republican Party has a lot of work to do,” he said.

Schmidt decided to appear at Log Cabin’s annual convention because he said the GOP has been “a shrinking party” in recent years.

“It has been losing market share,” he said. “I believe in a Republican Party that is a broad national party that is big enough to tolerate a broad range of views on issues.”

Schmidt urged Republicans to steer clear of divisive social issues if they are to remain viable candidates.

“I think the Republican Party should not be seen by a broad majority of the electorate as focused with singularity on issues like gay marriage,” he said. “The attitudes of voters about gay marriage and about domestic partnership benefits for gay couples are changing very rapidly and for voters under the age of 30, they are completely disconnected from what has been Republican orthodoxy on these issues.”

But is there any danger of the Republican Party reverting to attacks on gays in an attempt to stage a political comeback?

Schmidt said “any campaign that would go out and try to demonize people on the basis of their sexual orientation is abhorrent and I suspect that that campaign would be rejected.”

Schmidt says McCain ‘proud’ of Palin’s campaign role

When asked whether he had any regrets about the campaign selecting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) as McCain’s running mate, Schmidt said McCain is “proud of the job that Gov. Palin did during the campaign.”

“I think that many of her positions were caricatured beyond any recognition to reality,” he said. “It’s a narrative left over from the campaign that’s just not appropriate to open and to discuss and I think fundamentally the whole thing was unfair to her.”

Schmidt said Palin ought to be judged on the work that she’s done as governor of Alaska since the completion of the presidential campaign.

Schmidt declined to comment on whether media reports were true that she was going “rogue” during the latter part of the campaign. In an October interview with a Christian media outlet, Palin expressed support for the Federal Marriage Amendment — a position that McCain didn’t hold.

Schmidt said former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would be a strong presidential contender in the future because the GOP has “a habit of nominating people who have been around the track at least once before.

“So when he should decide to run, he would be very strong,” Schmidt said.

He also called Utah Gov. John Huntsman (R) “a deeply, deeply impressive person” and said if Huntsman wanted to be president, “he would be a deeply impressive candidate for a lot of people.”

Huntsman recently came out in favor of civil unions, despite the fact that 70 percent of Utah residents oppose them.

Other rising Republican stars that Schmidt noted were Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R), former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R).

As for whether Palin could be a presidential contender in 2012, Schmidt said the American people have had a “high degree of exposure” to her following her campaign.

“I think there’s a bit of information out there for your average person to make their own minds about her viability,” he said.

He noted that he’s not working with any of these politicians and is merely “happily watching from the sidelines.”

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By CHRIS JOHNSON, Washington Blade | Mar 25, 3:53 PM