Word: salters
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There is a widespread assumption that if Salter didn't create the persona that is the modern McCain, he certainly gave it an airbrushing in the books he wrote with the Senator. Salter disputes this. "McCain was a fully formed human being when I met him," Salter explains. "It's his story. It's not some story that I gave him." It is, however, a story Salter passionately defends, endlessly firing off e-mails from his BlackBerry and penning letters to the editors of major publications. But the two men aren't always of one mind. Salter objected strongly...
...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...
...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...
Vital as they have been to reviving McCain's chances, both Schmidt and Salter claim little aspiration to power. Win or lose, Salter plans to take months off at his Maine cabin next year. Schmidt has vowed not to serve in a McCain White House, saying he wants to return to California, where he hopes one day to finish college so he can teach high school history and coach teenagers. Like nearly everyone else on McCain's virtually all-male senior staff, the two men have fashioned themselves as ragtag outsiders, buddies and true believers in McCain who will play...