{"id":11401,"date":"2007-07-10T15:30:48","date_gmt":"2007-07-10T19:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11401.html"},"modified":"2007-07-10T15:30:48","modified_gmt":"2007-07-10T19:30:48","slug":"is-mccain-done","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/is-mccain-done\/","title":{"rendered":"Is McCain done?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just two short months ago, the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza reported on John McCain’s “inner circle<\/a>,” the “core” group of advisors who shape the senator’s campaign. At the top of the list were campaign manager Terry Nelson, strategist John Weaver, and longtime advisor Mark Salter.<\/p>\n

As of this afternoon, all three are gone. As are deputy campaign manager Reed Galen and political director Rob Jesmer, both of whom also resigned today.<\/p>\n

I’ve heard about top-tier presidential campaigns reshuffling some staffers during rough patches, but never anything quite like this.<\/p>\n

Marc Ambinder has an interesting account<\/a> of the behind-the-scenes wrangling that led to today’s defenestration, but I think Cillizza alludes to<\/a> a key point.<\/p>\n

Seeking to avoid being cast as the Republican outsider — a label that he believed cost him the GOP nomination in 2000 — McCain (and Weaver) spent much of 2006 recruiting key cogs in the presidential campaign of George W. Bush. Nelson, who was Bush’s political director in 2004, was seen as the crown jewel in that recruitment effort, a member of the Bush inner circle who was widely regarded as a strategist on the rise.<\/p>\n

As more and more elements of the Bush campaign were added to McCain’s operations — especially on the fundraising side — several members of the 2000 McCain Inner Circle left the campaign. Craig Goldman, who served as executive director of McCain’s Straight Talk America PAC in the run-up to the presidential race, was the first and was followed by longtime McCain finance consultant Carla Eudy who was dismissed from the campaign following McCain’s disappointing first fundraising quarter.<\/p>\n

Those who remained cast the departures as typical growing pains in a frontrunning campaign. But, as the campaign began to lose momentum the fissures within McCain’s world widened and it became clear they were slowing the campaign down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One wonders what would have happened if McCain hadn’t been so desperate to repackage himself as a Bush-like insider. Maybe his loyal team that had been with him for years could have had him in a competitive position.
\n
\nAt this point, I suppose it’s still possible for McCain to come back, but it’s hard to see how. Greg Sargent notes<\/a> the new head of the campaign, and describes the situation this way:<\/p>\n

Rick Davis, a longtime member of John McCain’s inner circle, has been tapped to run McCain’s campaign in the wake of the resignations of two of his top aides, two McCain sources tell the Politico’s Jonathan Martin.<\/p>\n

Davis, as it happens, managed McCain’s campaign back in 2000. So it’s easy to interpret his appointment today as born of a desire to return to that hallowed time — a time when McCain was a maverick for the first time; when he was the insurgent candidate whose Straight Talk Express was revered and not ridiculed by the press; when the Iraq War was merely a gleam in Dick Cheney’s eye. Nothing can turn back this clock, though.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I completely agree. If you’re a wealthy Republican donor, betting on a candidate, are you going to invest in McCain’s campaign right now? I don’t think so.<\/p>\n

The question now is how long until McCain calls it quits. My money is on October (after Q3 fundraising reports). How about you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just two short months ago, the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza reported on John McCain’s “inner circle,” the “core” group of advisors who shape the senator’s campaign. At the top of the list were campaign manager Terry Nelson, strategist John Weaver, and longtime advisor Mark Salter. As of this afternoon, all three are gone. As are deputy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}