Shake up in the McCain campaign
After the continuing complaints about the McCain campaign coming from Republicans all over the place (the latest rendition,) the McCain campaign moves campaign manager Rick Davis "up" to a strategic/messaging role and takes away his day to day operations, giving them to Steve Schmidt.
(Ambinder has a little more. This sounds like this is a concession to all the complaints about slipshod day to day coordination.)
And, the first thing that Schmidt does is completely tear down the independent regional manager structure that was supposed to be the innovative political base of the McCain campaign.
(Ambinder has a little more. This sounds like this is a concession to all the complaints about slipshod day to day coordination.)
And, the first thing that Schmidt does is completely tear down the independent regional manager structure that was supposed to be the innovative political base of the McCain campaign.
posted by mikevotes at
3:27 PM
2 Comments:
From the link:
“Rather than trying to pull me in and make me an intricate part of the team they just told me what they wanted done, and said if you don’t play ball we won’t play ball,” one state chairman said.
I fail to see how moving from a regional to a national structure will help that state chairman's situation. OTOH, if they were blowing off the state Party officials under the regional structure, it's hard to see how things could get worse with the new arrangement.
The dirty little secret here is that the RNC has the vast majority of McCain's campaign money, since the campaign itself has done poorly (by Republican standards) raising money. As long as McCain keeps the national Party folks reasonably happy, then he has all the money he needs. By blowing off the state-level people he loses no money, but he loses the "local" focus. Isn't the local focus what the NRCC said was needed?
If McCain runs a virtually national-style campaign, what has he got? Patriotism and "fear Obama". The narrow way that the GOP has re-defined patriotism excludes everyone but the "Faithful", by and large. Obama's "strong favourables" are too high and he's too non-threatening of a personality to get much traction from "Obama dread".
Bush flew a fighter plane, too. See how big a difference that made? But I digress.
By
Todd Dugdale , at 5:13 PM
It actually reads a little weirder than that. It sounded to me like they were blackmailing some of the states saying do what we want or we won't give you money.
A sure way to ensure heartfelt support.
And, I've got a post on the RNC money, sitting, waiting to be posted. Bush has raised almost all of that money. McCain has raised next to none.
If it's slow, I'll post it tomorrow.
By
mikevotes, at 10:13 PM
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