Word: strategists
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That's why the McCain team decided to go for broke. Under the direction of top political strategist Steve Schmidt, the campaign's new goal is to tag Obama as nothing more than an untested politician with considerable rhetorical talents while touting McCain as the proven independent reformer voters already know. Schmidt, who took over the day-to-day operation of the campaign on July 2, is a bulldog of a man, broad and bald, with a take-no-prisoners style. A veteran of the 2004 Bush campaign and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election effort, Schmidt ordered...
...fall they will plunge further as refiners ease away from the expensive cocktails they are forced to use to prevent gas from evaporating in the summer, consumption drops and speculators begin to anticipate a flat U.S. economy over the next few quarters, said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Stanford Washington Research Group. "Gas prices are headed lower in the coming weeks because the oil futures market finally is reflecting supply-demand shifts," Valliere said. "There is no policy initiative that could have done this, nothing from Washington. Market forces finally are dominating the speculators." And at least with...
...their most basic levels, presidential campaigns are storytelling wars. After John Kerry lost the 2004 election, the Democratic strategist James Carville summed up his candidate's problem this way: "There's a Republican narrative," he said on NBC's Meet the Press. "And there's a Democratic litany...
...former McCain adviser, John Weaver, also expressed worry to the Atlantic Monthly that the spot would make McCain look "childish" and "diminish the brand." On the other side of the argument, Republican strategists worry that the new approach may not be enough to take down Obama, especially in the absence of a third-party group, like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004. "They have managed to scare off outside groups," said one veteran party strategist of McCain's, who, as a longtime supporter of campaign finance reform, is opposed to such third-party spending. "The outside groups have...
...these developments are certain to be less important over time than the fact that the McCain campaign, for better or worse, has finally settled on a story line that could carry the presumptive Republican nominee through the convention and into November. As a second Republican strategist put it late Wednesday afternoon, "They at least have somewhat of a message." And for one of the first times in months, the campaign has managed to maintain that message for almost two weeks...