You've got to be Schmidting me!

In life, forgiveness is crucial. But in baseball and in politics, eternal grudges are perfectly acceptable. Take Steve Schmidt. Please.

We all remember the brilliant political strategist's most infamous achievement: making scatterbrained Sarah Palin a nominee for vice president. In more recent times, people have looked at Schmidt more fondly, because he has renounced his Republican affiliation and has become one of the most acerbic critics of the current "president."

Now Schmidt has decided to go all harebrained again, by becoming the political guru behind the caffeine-fueled nascent presidential candidacy of Howard Schultz, the Starbucks guy. On one level, this could be a brilliant move by Schmidt: If Schultz actually gets on the ballot in all 50 states and somehow manages to split the anti-President Spanky vote and get him re-elected in 2020, that will make a lot of people forget about the Palin episode. Not me. I can hold a grudge against him forever,  for both outrages. Meanwhile, let's hope that cable news executives end  his gig as an expert "contributor" as long as this insane campaign continues.

Why is the Schultz idea so nutty, even apart from the likelihood that it could give us four more years of the most incompetent president in American history? Here's why: If we have learned nothing else from the past two years, we have learned the utter idiocy of the perpetual Republican mantra that we should run government like a business. To the extent that you can describe our organizationally challenged "president" as running anything, he is running the United States government just as he ran his private business: badly. He is rich for three reasons: 1) His father gave him hundreds of millions to start with. 2) His main business practice is to refuse to pay people who have worked for him, until they sue him. 3) He apparently was not issued a conscience.

It's time for a president who has actually had some experience in governing—not another billionaire with zero knowledge of how to govern  a city, a state, or even a legislative office. The whole Schultz-Schmidt idea is as solid and substantive as latte foam. Don't swallow it.