(Via jdcow40 at Flickr.)

I don’t think anyone here has written yet about Robert Draper’s attempted dissection in the New York Times magazine of the schizophrenic McCain presidential campaign.  Digby captures the gist of it well ("Republicans have become so enraptured by their hype about ‘marketing’ and ‘branding’ that they’ve forgotten that you need to have something in the package you’re selling besides air"), but the full article is an amazingly rich source of anecdotes — some insightful, some dubious, and some just plain weird.  This story told by pseudo-strategist Steve Schmidt to Draper may fit in all three categories:

The smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard was dispensed by George W. Bush one spring day at the White House residence in 2004, at a time when his re-election effort was not going especially well. The strategists at the meeting — including Schmidt, who was directing the Bush campaign’s rapid-response unit — fretted over their candidate’s sagging approval ratings and the grim headlines about the war in Iraq. Only Bush appeared thoroughly unworried. He explained to them why, polls notwithstanding, voters would ultimately prefer him over his opponent, John Kerry.

There’s an accidental genius to the way Americans pick a president, Schmidt remembers Bush saying that day. By the end of it all, a candidate’s true character is revealed to the American people.

Leaving aside that this obviously wasn’t true for Dubya (although it may be proving that way for McCain), I’m with John Cole:  What are we supposed to make of a so-called strategist who says he got the best political advice of his life from George Bush? Isn’t that like taking performance advice from Howdy Doody or Charlie McCarthy?

Then again, I suppose that’s what Sarah Palin did.