Steve Schmidt: Nominating Palin would be “catastrophic” for the GOP; Update: Video added

There’ll be no such thing as a “catastrophic” GOP nominee so long as unemployment remains in the toilet, which, given today’s worse-than-expected numbers — including a real rate of 17 percent if you include “discouraged workers” — it looks set to do for a bad long awhile. Here’s the obligatory link to the updated chart at Innocent Bystanders comparing the actual rate to The One’s moronic pre-stimulus fantasyland projections. Note that the White House has unemployment projected for 5.5 percent or so in late 2012, a number that’s likely to haunt them during the next campaign. So long as things are this tough, Obama won’t have a cakewalk against anyone, Palin included.

But that avoids Schmidt’s basic point, i.e. would nominating Palin give The One a better chance than nominating someone else? She does have trouble with independents, although she may be in the process of addressing that by refashioning herself as a strong-form libertarian. She has huge problems with women. And given the image that’s taken hold of her, in Krauthammer’s words, as someone unduly dependent on “platitudes and cliches,” nominating her would turn an election that’s supposed to be a referendum on Obama’s first term into a referendum on whether Sarah Palin knows what she’s talking about. Every misstep and error when discussing policy on the trail will be magnified through the lens of the Tina Fey “I can see Russia from my house” nonsense; the Democrats and the media will frame her as a female Dan Quayle and contrast Obama’s four years of presidential experience with centrists’ doubts about her qualifications. It’s not that she’ll have to be able to talk policy as fluently as any other candidate, she’ll have to be able to talk about it more fluently to scrub the media image of her as an ignoramus. It’s not impossible but … it’s tough.