Word: schmidt
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...Beinart's commentary suggests that the best thing for the Republican Party may actually be losing in November. Michael Scherer, who has been on the McCain bus and plane for 17 months now, gets inside McCain's tight-knit campaign team, led by two unique personalities: the strategist Steve Schmidt and McCain's alter ego and chief speechwriter, Mark Salter. And Mark Halperin tracked McCain's path to nomination for The Page...
...about this point in a presidential campaign, the candidates' top advisers are often reduced to cartoons, their personalities melted into caricatures, their humanity sharpened into daggers aimed at the other guy. Take Steve Schmidt, John McCain's latest political guru--a big, bald, barrel-chested stack of a man nicknamed "the Bullet" for his shiny scalp and steely focus. He's been painted as a bruiser who single-handedly trained McCain in the ruthless ways of general-election politics, in which the press is an adversary and any candor is punished. He's the one who always said Barack Obama...
...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...
...politician known to keep the same staff for years, Schmidt, 37, is the newcomer. He grew up in New Jersey, a fan of Ronald Reagan's, though he never fully signed on to the hard right's views on social issues. He attended but left the University of Delaware and gradually worked his way up through small political campaigns, landing in 1998 as a press secretary for the underfunded California Senate campaign of Matt Fong, who lost to Barbara Boxer. At one point, to drum up press coverage about Fong's contention that Boxer did not take terrorism seriously, Schmidt...