Mar 27, 2009  |  By: Chris Johnson  | COMMENTS     

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 Schwarz-enegger 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.

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 ...