Last week I reported on something the mainstream press didn’t bother with:  that Democratic Senator Elizabeth Schneider was strongly leaning toward endorsing Eliot Cutler, making her the second high profile Senate Democrat to abandon the Democratic President of the Maine Senate, Libby Mitchell.

Well, guess who was right (again)?

Today, Cutler’s team released an endorsement from, you guessed it, Senator Elizabeth Schneider:

“My decision reflects more completely the desires of those I serve, as well as my interest in having a collaborative, fair, thoughtful, strong, candid, trustworthy, successful, honest individual to lead our state,” Schneider said. “Eliot Cutler embodies all of these qualities. It is in the best interest of my Senate District 30 and all of Maine to work to elect a person who has the best chance to bring our state together in this time of severe economic stress and challenge.”

This represents another fairly damning indictment of Libby Mitchell, after the previous endorsement of Cutler by Senator Dennis Damon.  While endorsements do not typically matter to voters, this most certainly matters for campaign messaging and the building of a persona.  And it is most certainly more important regarding Mitchell than it is for Cutler.

This makes the second lawmaker that is currently a member of Libby Mitchell’s majority coalition in the Maine Senate – somebody who not only works with her, but in many respects for her – who has outright rejected her in favor of Eliot Cutler.  Libby Mitchell is having an extremely difficult time keeping the members of her own party, specifically her own colleagues in the Senate, in line with her candidacy.

I find this development utterly staggering.  If Mitchell is unacceptable to the people who work the closest with her, what exactly does that mean about her ability to convince fence sitters?  What does it tell us about her leadership style?  Is she that loathed within her own caucus?  Have her tactics resulted in this much poison being present?  When you couple it with a high profile rejection of the major piece of legislation she championed this year (paid sick leave), does not her claim of an ability to “get things done” kind of melt away?

Libby Mitchell can’t even marshal her own sitting Democratic Senate colleagues to vote for her.  How can she make the case that she can unite Mainers of all political persuasions if she can’t even unite the people who work with her?  I have heard for some time now from Democratic insiders in Augusta that there are a lot of Democrats who do not like Libby Mitchell, and find her leadership style to be strong armed, offensive, and objectionable.  She has apparently irritated many members of her own party, and seems to be paying the price for that now.

I’m sorry, but I simply do not see the appeal of this woman this year.  From everything I keep hearing from Democrats, she seems reviled by a strong element in her own party, she is a very un-dynamic candidate, she has been in government for decades and is the quintessential professional legislator in a year where career politicians are dropping like flies, her message is uninspiring, confusingly detached from reality, and out of date, she comes off as arrogant and entitled (“That’s nice dear, but don’t y’all think you should consider running for City Council, first?“), but to top it all off, she is a defender of the status quo in a year when no one has any interest in the status quo.

I mean, at this point the campaign is such a disaster that her team can’t even send me emails with header bars aligned properly – they look like something somebody paid “cousin Jimmy who knows about computers” to do for them.  Throw in the fact that she’s a native South Carolinian and in my book you have just about the worst possible candidate that could have been nominated this year.

Now, in other years, she likely would have a lot more strength.  But she is mis-matched to this election more than any candidate for any office in any part of Maine.

So, while I’m sure Eliot Cutler is happy to have Schneider on board – this endorsement says a lot more about Mitchell than it does about Cutler.