Three years later, McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, expressed remorse about choosing the VP candidate he’d once called “a star.” “I think that she helped usher in an era of know-nothingness and mainstreamed it in the Republican Party to the detriment of the conservative movement,” he said. “And I think her nomination trivialized American politics, and had a lot of results that I’m not particularly comfortable with… [I]t was a mistake.”
