Word: mccain
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...Schmidt is the candidate's drill sergeant, Mark Salter is his purported soul. A brooding writer who wears a goatee, faded Levis and a cigarette on his lips, Salter is known as the author of the McCain myth, the pen behind five of the Senator's books, the chief deacon in the Church of John. His soaring sentences are said to have been forged from experience, from a youth that had him pounding Iowa railroad ties and dating Miss USA. But neither man has too much patience for his own reputation. Salter, the writer, knows how the game works...
...truth about both men is, of course, more complex, unfit to be folded into a few dozen sentences. Salter and Schmidt are among the closest advisers and friends to McCain, but neither is his captain nor his conscience. At times, they serve as his protectors and his soldiers, often spewing negative invective that can border on name-calling. But politics is not their first love or final destination. Unlike Karl Rove, neither man has grand plans to transform Republican politics or the country. They rose to the top of the Washington rock pile by happenstance as much as by design...
Assignments followed at the Bush campaign in 2004, for Vice President Dick Cheney and then for Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2005 re-election campaign. His current role in the McCain campaign occurred after the candidate realized he needed someone fearless who could ride hard on ... McCain. Salter says Schmidt runs the campaign like the high school football coach he aspires to become. "If you blow it, you are going to run wind sprints," he jokes...
...worked in the war room of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign. An absolute falsehood, he maintains, along with the claim that he sometimes gets nosebleeds when he gets angry, like stigmata of his temper. The nosebleeds, he says, just happen sometimes, as they would for anybody else. When McCain calls him "Sergeant Schmidt," the candidate is making a joke on a couple of different levels...
Salter, 53, goes back with McCain longer, and the ties between the two are deeper. Raised in Davenport, Iowa, and schooled at Georgetown, he fell into a freelance speech-writing job for McCain in 1988. Before long, he had become McCain's chief of staff and one of his closest friends. Salter married a former McCain aide. His house in Maine was purchased with the proceeds from the books he wrote for McCain. Mark McKinnon, a veteran of the Bush campaigns who worked closely with McCain and Salter during the primaries, describes Salter's role as that of three staffers...