Steve Schmidt

What advice the Republican party is receiving

I confess I’m loving the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s latest attempt to mix sensational and serious journalism. (She remade Vanity Fair in the ’80s, revived The New Yorker in the ’90s — though yes, I greatly prefer both magazines under the editors who succeeded her — and faceplanted with Talk after that.) Daily Beast is a mix of aggregating, reporting and blogging, clearly designed to take on Huffington Post. It’s existing in a financial fantasy world for the moment, pushing out high-impact original journalism and selling no ads, a path the National Post trod in its early years, with the results we all know. But for however long it lasts, it’s high-calorie fun. Here’s Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s campaign manger, describing the moment when he realized his candidate couldn’t win. It was about five weeks before the vote — coincidentally, the length of a standard Canadian general-election campaign.