The perception in Republican circles is that John McCain’s campaign has been slow to take advantage of various opportunities, lacks focus, and has generally been unimpressive as the general-election phase of the campaign has gotten underway over the last month.<\/p>\n
Given the intra-party grumbling, it probably shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that McCain has made another staffing change at the top<\/a>, the second shake-up in a year.<\/p>\n Steve Schmidt is taking over the day-to-day operation of John McCain\u2019s campaign, according to multiple campaign sources.<\/p>\n At a staff meeting in the campaign’s Arlington, Va., headquarters this morning, campaign manager Rick Davis made the announcement about Schmidt’s new role. <\/p>\n Schmidt, a bald and barrel-chested operative known for his aggressive brand of political combat, responded by exhorting campaign aides with a speech that one staffer likened to a locker room pep talk out of the football movie “Rudy.”<\/p>\n After the meeting, on a regularly scheduled conference call with McCain’s 11 regional campaign managers, senior staff briefed the field aides about the move, explaining Davis would focus more on long-range tasks while Schmidt was taking an enhanced daily role, said an individual on the call.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n According to reports, Schmidt will now handle the responsibilities of a campaign manager — coordinating the campaign’s message, and overseeing scheduling, policy matters, coalitions, and campaign surrogates. Lobbyist Rick Davis, who had these responsibilities up until today, will reportedly tackle “big-picture issues such as general strategy,” which I thought was Charlie Black’s job.<\/p>\n Apparently, there’s some confusion about the chain of command, which in and of itself, is symptomatic of a campaign that’s not firing on all cylinders. Now, accounts diverge on the exact nature of the new chain of command. One top McCain source said that Schmidt “assumed full operational control of the campaign today” and described Davis as “a general manager.”<\/p>\n But Charlie Black, another top adviser, said Davis was still in charge.<\/p>\n “Steve is going to function under Rick as a [chief operating officer],” Black said. “Rick still has authority over all things. Steve works for Rick.”<\/p>\n But Black made sure to not diminish Schmidt’s elevated role in the campaign.<\/p>\n “He’ll be the maestro who conducts the symphony,” Black said of Schmidt’s position in driving McCain’s message.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s probably safe to say that the McCain campaign wants everyone to think this was a minor, subtle staffing change, and that there was no major shift at the top of the campaign structure. But given what we know, that appears to be a pretty weak spin — when you take away the responsibilities of the campaign manager, give the job to someone else, and let the guy who was the campaign manager tackle “big-picture issues,” the practical result is that McCain just fired his campaign manager and picked a new one. That’s what happens when the new guy takes “full operational control<\/a>” of the campaign.<\/p>\n It’s not especially unusual for presidential campaigns to switch managers in order to get on track, but it is odd for a leading-party nominee to have three different campaign managers in the course of one year, with the third being named just four months before Election Day.<\/p>\n In this sense, today’s announcement will either quiet talk about McCain campaign disarray, or reinforce it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The perception in Republican circles is that John McCain’s campaign has been slow to take advantage of various opportunities, lacks focus, and has generally been unimpressive as the general-election phase of the campaign has gotten underway over the last month. Given the intra-party grumbling, it probably shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that McCain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16072","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=16072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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