This Breitbart article about McCain’s 2008 campaign team is infuriating me far too much for me to write coherently about it for very long, so let me be brief: speaking professionally, I agree with it. The faction of Team McCain represented by Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a Republican Presidential campaign for the rest of their lives.

And I mean it: the main campaign was a collection of professional political malpractice that seemed content to merely put up enough of a fight to satisfy honor, then lose gracefully. While I like and respect most of the people who were directly involved in handling New Media aspects for McCain, it became incredibly clear by the end of the 2008 election cycle that the McCain campaign essentially treated those people with about as much respect as they did us; which is to say, none at all. The campaign would have happily ignored us completely, if they thought that they could get away with it; as it was, they made sure that we knew that our inclusion was both grudging and resented – and literally muted whenever possible.

How bad was it? Let me put it this way: I’ve already gotten more out of Romney’s campaign than I ever have out of McCain’s – and Mitt Romney isn’t even the official nominee yet. The bottom line is that it turned out that John McCain wanted to be the nominee a heck of a lot more than he ever wanted to be the President, and while I’m sure that McCain feels that his team acquitted themselves well in the 2008 general election the rest of us are… somewhat unpersuaded.

But don’t get me started. There was one conference call that still raises my blood pressure by a measurable amount…

(H/T: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Like many people at the time, I thought that McCain’s offer to suspend campaigning as a reaction to the financial crisis was a good one; the difference is that I am willing to admit that yeah, I got that one catastrophically wrong.