John McCain grounded: Limited cell phone, time with pals.

[SirNitram]

Link

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain is so quick to pick up his gold-colored cellphone to solicit advice — from senators, campaign consultants, even the stray former deputy press secretary — that aides, concerned about his tendency to adopt the last opinion he has heard, have tried to cut back on the time he has to make calls.

Mr. McCain is known to sign off on big campaign decisions and then to march off his own reservation. Two weeks ago, he publicly disagreed with his own spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, after she used a line of attack against Senator Barack Obama that he had approved after careful strategizing within his campaign. Ms. Hazelbaker raced out of the Virginia campaign headquarters and refused to take Mr. McCain’s calls of apology, aides said, and a plan to have Republican members of Congress use the same critical line about Mr. Obama’s foreign trip fell apart.

Out of his hearing, Mr. McCain is called the White Tornado by some people who have worked for him over the years. Throughout his presidential campaign, he has been the overseer of a kingdom of dissenting camps, unclear lines of command and an unsettled atmosphere that keeps aides constantly on edge.

Even now, after a shake-up that aides said had brought an unusual degree of order to Mr. McCain’s disorderly world in the last month, two of his pollsters are at odds over parts of the campaign’s message, while past and current aides have been trading snippy exchanges debating the wisdom of attack advertisements he has aimed at Mr. Obama.

In an interview, Mr. McCain said he believed an organization consisting of sometimes colliding centers of power made sure that a candidate, or a president, reached fully informed decisions. “You’ve got to have competing opinions,” he said.

“I think a certain amount of tension is very healthy, and a certain amount of different views,” he said. “Because of the bubble that a president is in, and the bubble that a candidate is in, sometimes you find out afterwards something that — ‘Oh boy, I wish I had heard thus and such and so and so.’ So I appreciate and want some of the tension; I don’t want too much of it, obviously, because we have to have certain efficiencies. But I think there is a balance there.”

Mr. McCain hungers for information. He can regularly be seen reading newspapers from cover to cover, and aides say he embraces the briefing books given to him each night. His aides say he is especially studious when it comes to economic issues, an area in which he has admitted weakness. A former fighter pilot, Mr. McCain preaches the need to improvise under pressure, subscribing to the military maxim that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The bursts of temper fellow senators have endured are rarely directed at his underlings. Indeed Mr. McCain has a history of being surrounded by people who are intensely loyal to him — and remain so even after being pushed off his ship.

But if Mr. McCain’s management style has kept him well informed and flexible, its drawbacks have been especially evident in the many often turbulent months since he began his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. It offers a contrast to the more rigidly controlled and nearly corporate management style that has marked the campaign of Mr. Obama, his Democratic counterpart. If anything, it recalls the freewheeling ways of the last Republican senator to win his party’s presidential nomination, Bob Dole in 1996.

Mr. McCain’s style contains contradictions, veering between a shoot-from-the-hip tendency and assertions of damn-the-consequences authenticity on the one hand and a grudging acceptance on the other of the need to give in to the discipline of programmed politics. While he avidly seeks advice and contrary opinions, he routinely resists basic political counseling, such as when aides pleaded with him not to campaign sitting on a horseshoe-shaped couch in the back of his bus because they feared it made him look like an old man rumbling around the country in an R.V. He refused.

His management of his campaign offers a glimpse of how he might run the White House. He would, it appears, be a president who is intensely interested in issues (particularly foreign affairs) and open to conflicting opinions, but also impetuous at times and tolerant of the kind of internal churning that can impede orderly decision-making and keep aides on edge.

While President Bush has been criticized for being too insular and too slow to adapt to changing circumstances, Mr. McCain’s leadership of his campaign suggests a less hierarchical, more free-form style, much closer to that of President Bill Clinton.

For now, Mr. McCain’s executive style looms as a potential obstacle to his hopes of getting to the White House. His campaign has been rocked by personnel changes and often well-publicized differences. And for all the efforts to maintain discipline, he continues to be plagued by misstatements and apparent gaffes as he at times bucks what his own campaign is trying to do. After his campaign spent days mocking Mr. Obama for suggesting that proper tire pressure was one way of conserving fuel, Mr. McCain undercut the message, stating : “Senator Obama a couple of days ago said that we ought to all inflate our tires, and I don’t disagree with that. The American Automobile Association strongly recommends it.”

As Mr. Obama’s campaign pounced on the remark, the McCain campaign quickly sent out an e-mail message to reporters noting that Mr. McCain had gone on to say that he did not believe that would lead to energy independence.

By all accounts, the most recent shake-up of his campaign has helped. It put Steve Schmidt — a former marine known for a tough management style who made clear he would leave if he was not given the authority to impose discipline — in a senior role at headquarters, working alongside Rick Davis, a longtime survivor of the McCain staff wars.

Mr. Schmidt has sought to cut down on Mr. McCain’s use of his cellphone and limit the people who have regular access to Mr. McCain in an effort to keep him more focused, advisers said. He has been the impetus for an effort by Mr. McCain to limit sharply his engagements with reporters, the kind of freewheeling encounters that Mr. McCain enjoys — and that helped him charm the news media for years — but that often lead him to veer from his campaign’s message of the day.

There are 8 a.m. calls every day in which the campaign settles on the daily message or attack. Someone in Mr. McCain’s entourage — typically Nicolle Wallace, a Schmidt ally and a veteran of Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign and White House who recently joined the campaign as a traveling senior adviser — is given the responsibility of making sure Mr. McCain agrees to the message and tries to stick to it.

“Now there is a management structure,” Ms. Wallace said. “It is formally headed by Steve and Rick. This is one of the things that has been improved.”

Mr. McCain seems to draw much of his management philosophy from his military experience. He has cited as evidence of his executive ability his role reviving the Navy’s largest air squadron, the beleaguered VA 174, the Replacement Air Group at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1975. It had about 50 planes, half “in such bad shape that they had to be grounded,” as he put it when challenged at a Republican debate last October about his management credentials.

“Soldiers are taught to expect the unexpected and accept it, and revise, improvise, and fight their way through any adversity,” he said as he recounted how he turned around the operation.

In his campaign, Mr. McCain weighs in on all major decisions, but does not get involved in too many details. He has explicitly signed off on every major new line of attack and new advertisement, watching the advertisements on a laptop, aides said.

But unlike Mr. Bush or Mr. Clinton, Mr. McCain has displayed no particular interest in or knowledge of the minutiae of politics. He rarely gets involved with discussions about what states he should visit, other than to insist that he spend a day or two at home in Arizona most weekends. One of his pollsters, Bill McInturff, said that Mr. McCain was not the kind of candidate who asked to look at the detailed cross-tabs of every poll.

“The guy’s incredibly engaged in this process,” Mr. McInturff said, “but he’s not a client who has much tolerance for sitting through an hourlong presentation, or 30- to 40-minute presentation of slides and charts.” Mr. McCain’s advisers said he pays more attention to his campaign’s spending and fund-raising than he did before it nearly went broke in July 2007. Mr. McCain told friends he was surprised — and mortified — when that happened. Mark McKinnon, a former adviser, pointed to Mr. McCain’s reaction to that crisis — slashing staff and dismissing some senior advisers — as evidence of management strength. “He did all the things you need to do to right the ship,” Mr. McKinnon said.

Yet even now the campaign continues to have its share of drama. Several Republicans in regular contact with the campaign said two pollsters, Mr. McInturff and Ed Goeas, had fundamental differences over the campaign’s message. They said the two differed over the degree to which Mr. McCain should establish his differences with Mr. Bush and the extent to which he should run on a “Washington is broken” message, which Mr. Goeas supports.

Mr. McInturff declined to comment when asked about the divisions. But, he said more broadly, “there can be differences of thought, but campaigns don’t collapse because you have differences of opinion.” Mr. Goeas did not return calls.

Mr. McCain also tolerates, or, some aides said, encourages, tension in his upper ranks. He did nothing to tamp down a wave of speculation this summer that his former chief campaign strategist, Mike Murphy, would be brought back into the fold, reports that set off waves of tensions among other aides who had a history of battling with Mr. Murphy. Mr. Murphy ultimately announced he was taking a job at MSNBC.

In recent weeks, Mr. Murphy and another former top aide, John Weaver, were critical of Mr. McCain’s advertisements attacking Mr. Obama. The two men privately urged Mr. Schmidt and Charlie Black, a senior adviser, to get off that course and spend as much time building up Mr. McCain as tearing down Mr. Obama, advice also offered by a member of Mr. McCain’s panel of outside advertising consultants, Alex Castellanos. They met stiff, angry resistance, several people familiar with the episode said.

The basic idea that the campaign is treating him like an unruly teenager is hilarious. Remember when the GOP declared 'The Grownups Were In Charge'?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The last international ruler I can remember who was known to take the last advice offered in a meeting as his own judgement no matter what that advice was, was of course Tsar Nicholas II.

[Darth Wong]

It's not that he automatically decides to take the last advice he heard. It's that he can't remember anything else.

[Glocksman]

Didn't you know that John McCain doesn't speak for John McCain?

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief economic adviser, says the numbers he provided to the TPC aren’t secret—they’re the same ones he provides to anyone who asks. He also disputes the way the study takes suggestions McCain has made on the stump out of context. “This is parsing words out of campaign appearances to an unreasonable degree,” Holtz-Eakin said. “He has certainly I’m sure said things in town halls” that don’t jibe perfectly with his written plan. But that doesn’t mean it’s official.".

If Obama were white, I'm sure he'd be 20 points ahead and climbing right now.
The old saw about how a black guy wanting to compete must be twice as good as his white competition is apparently all too true with large segments of the population.

Though I think Obama passes that threshold easily.

[Darth Wong]

If Obama were white, I'm sure he'd be 20 points ahead and climbing right now.
The old saw about how a black guy wanting to compete must be twice as good as his white competition is apparently all too true with large segments of the population.

Though I think Obama passes that threshold easily.

Polls generally show that around 30% of Americans openly admit to being racially prejudiced. By an interesting coincidence, this is the same proportion of Americans which is absolutely rock-solid loyal to President Bush. But in any case, that's almost a third of the country, which is a pretty big voting bloc. All the more reason for people who oppose racism to vote for Obama, because you know where all the racists are putting their votes.

[Solauren]

McCain almost sounds senile.

He signs off on one thing, and then says another.

I wish, I really wish, someone would point that out on national T.V.

Preferably in a venue where we can see Mr. McCain standing there, sputtering, then the person in question can start hitting him with examples.

[Glocksman]

McCain almost sounds senile.

He signs off on one thing, and then says another.

I wish, I really wish, someone would point that out on national T.V.

Preferably in a venue where we can see Mr. McCain standing there, sputtering, then the person in question can start hitting him with examples.

The debates are coming up, though given the media's deep throating of McCain, we can look forward to reprises of the ABC debate where both moderators savage Obama while softballing his opposition.

Especially in the third one, where 'Kneepads Bob' Fluffer...er Scheiffer is the moderator.
Never mind the facts that he's both friends with GWB and his brother was one of Bush's business partners and is currently Bush's Ambassador to Japan.

Rahm Emanuel *should* have said 'unacceptable' to the debate commission when they proposed that asshole to be a moderator.

Though since it's live, it'll be hard to keep a McSame blowup or meltdown out of the news.

[ArmorPierce]

If Obama were white, I'm sure he'd be 20 points ahead and climbing right now.
The old saw about how a black guy wanting to compete must be twice as good as his white competition is apparently all too true with large segments of the population.

Though I think Obama passes that threshold easily.

Polls generally show that around 30% of Americans openly admit to being racially prejudiced. By an interesting coincidence, this is the same proportion of Americans which is absolutely rock-solid loyal to President Bush. But in any case, that's almost a third of the country, which is a pretty big voting bloc. All the more reason for people who oppose racism to vote for Obama, because you know where all the racists are putting their votes.

My father is openly racist but he's voting Obama. There are two main types of open racists I think (two that comes to mind probably more). My father is the communist, atheist kind.

[Durandal]

The last international ruler I can remember who was known to take the last advice offered in a meeting as his own judgement no matter what that advice was, was of course Tsar Nicholas II.

So McCain is basically a FIFO device?

[ArmorPierce]

The last international ruler I can remember who was known to take the last advice offered in a meeting as his own judgement no matter what that advice was, was of course Tsar Nicholas II.

So McCain is basically a FIFO device?

Actually I would think that LIFO would better describe him