The Battle for America 2008

by Haynes Johnson

  By now the campaign was under severe stress internally. The operation was not working and was beset with infighting. McCain had created not so much a team of rivals, as Hillary Clinton had done, but a clash of cultures. The effort to meld together McCain 2000 and Bush 2004 created a huge gulf within the organization. Some longtime McCain aides jealously guarded their memories of that first campaign and, still bitter over what had happened, treated some of the new recruits as hostile outsiders. Campaign manager Terry Nelson said later, “I remember sitting down with [finance director] Carla Eudy in December and said are we going to do the Ranger and Pioneer thing [terms used for people who raised the most money for Bush] and she said no. And I say, ‘What?’ and she said, ‘’That’s the Bush way and we’re not going to do that.’ There was this sense that folks who were not part of the McCain 2000 team you weren’t there for the right reasons or you didn’t really care about the McCains or you were a hired guy.” Eudy said later she did not remember the conversation.

  There were four people atop the campaign: John Weaver, Mark Salter, Rick Davis and Terry Nelson. Weaver served as chief strategist. Tall and thin, he had spent years in Texas, where he had feuded with Karl Rove, before going national. He was shrewd and tough, overseeing all of McCain’s political operations. After the 2000 campaign, he was so bitterly disappointed that he briefly defected to the Democrats. He was a fierce competitor, impulsive in the way McCain could be. He had a keen understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of McCain’s 2000 campaign and no one had done more to put McCain in position to start the 2008 race as the leading candidate. Salter was McCain’s alter ego and, like a brother, had an unbreakable emotional bond with his boss. He had been with the senator since the late 1980s, an almost accidental hire who rose to become McCain’s top aide in the Senate office. He wrote all of McCain’s speeches as well as the best-selling books that bore both their names and, in a sign of McCain’s generosity and friendship, shared fully in the proceeds. He thought like McCain and knew his voice perfectly. Nobody spoke more authentically for McCain than Salter. He could anticipate McCain’s moods and reactions faster than the candidate. Salter reflected those moods too, both good and bad, and he was quick to defend his boss against what he saw as niggling and unfair criticism in the press.

  Davis had been with McCain for many years. He had managerial skills and a bubbly personality that sometimes disguised what a canny inside player he was. Davis had built a successful lobbying firm in Washington, one that had dealt with some unsavory foreign leaders. More than anyone, he was a survivor. One senior official new to McCain’s world was told when he joined the campaign, “Make friends with Rick Davis; you don’t know how things will work out.” Davis maintained tight relations with the candidate, with Cindy McCain, and with major fund-raisers. Nelson was the newcomer. A low-key midwesterner, he had served as political director of Bush’s campaign, where he earned the affection and loyalty of other Bush staffers. Nelson was recruited because he knew what a big political enterprise needed. If McCain wanted to replicate his live-off-the-land campaign of 2000, Nelson told people, he was ill-suited for that role. If McCain intended to run a version of the Bush reelection campaign, a large and robust operation designed to go the distance, Nelson believed he had the skills to do it. What he lacked was a close relationship with the candidate.

  The lines of authority were never clear. McCain preferred a lean and nimble operation. He often acted precipitately and preferred a campaign structure with no hierarchy or bureaucracy—a pirate ship rather than a battleship, as his advisers often joked. But that style was incompatible with the structure he had authorized. “Every bad internal management decision was a derivative ultimately of us not addressing the structure of the campaign,” Weaver said. Davis coexisted with Weaver and Salter, but tensely so in the early going. They operated in “independent silos,” as one adviser put it. As the campaign was gearing up, Weaver and Salter convinced McCain to bring in Nelson as campaign manager, the title Davis had held in 2000. Davis did not fight the move and said he would take the title of CEO. Later the trio urged McCain to strip Davis of his CEO title, fearing conflicts between Davis’s campaign role and his work with outside companies doing business with the campaign. McCain agreed, but the decision was soon reversed. The dispute lasted only a few weeks. In McCain’s world, that was typical; decisions like that rarely stuck.

  At the Phoenix Park meeting, the political team had discussed what to do about Davis. There was agreement that it would be best if Davis left the campaign entirely. Salter, who knew McCain and had no personal grudge against Davis, offered a more realistic view. According to an account by Robert Draper in Gentleman’s Quarterly, Salter told the others, “It’s not like we can just put Rick in a corner and give him a fucking banana.”

  Despite the changes at the beginning of the second quarter, the problems inside the campaign persisted.

  In the spring, Romney began airing television commercials in the early states. The expenditure seemed a classic waste of money: Would anyone pay attention to political ads so early? But for Romney, money was never a source of concern. Not only had he raised more than $20 million, he was prepared to dip into his personal fortune to make up for any shortfalls.

  Romney’s strategy for winning the nomination was tried and true: Win early and run on momentum. He tried what other lesser-known candidates had done, which was to focus his energies and resources on Iowa and New Hampshire in the hope of besting McCain or Giuliani in one or both. If he could win these states, he believed he might ride those victories through the other early contests. He could then seal his nomination on February 5th, when nearly two dozen states would vote. That early-state strategy had worked for Democrats John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000 (both had won Iowa and New Hampshire and were never seriously challenged thereafter), but no Republican in the modern era had won both states’ contests.

  Romney had rapidly built a large and impressive campaign team, hiring many of the best operatives in the Republican Party. He had an inner circle that included campaign manager Beth Myers, trusted business associate Bob White, and fund-raiser Spencer Zwick. He recruited older veterans like Ron Kaufman, Ben Ginsberg, and Tom Rath, who had experience in past presidential campaigns, and hired young, up-and-coming operatives like Matt Rhoades, who ran communications, and Kevin Madden, the press secretary. Alex Castellanos was the lead voice on advertising early in the campaign. Alex Gage, one of the party’s experts on microtargeting, helped Myers manage the operation. Carl Forti, a hard-nosed strategist who had worked at the National Republican Congressional Committee, ran the political shop.

  The Romney team assumed he would never move up dramatically in the national polls until he demonstrated support in the early states. By sinking millions into early ads, he began to be taken more seriously. With McCain hobbled by fund-raising problems and Giuliani following an uncertain strategy, Romney soon led the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Romney’s media adviser Castellanos said, “When you put Mitt Romney on TV, good things happen.”

  Giuliani continued to lead in national polls but otherwise appeared far less ready for a national campaign. He enjoyed playing the celebrity and the attention and adulation that went with it, but he seemed ill-equipped for the style of politics convincing to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. He did not devote time to town meetings like McCain or Romney. He didn’t always appear versed in local politics. “He never really sat down and interacted,” a McCain supporter from New Hampshire later told us. “He was sort of doing it New York style and people were going, ‘When’s he going to sit down and let me ask him three follow-ups?’ Probably in New York that’s how you do it. You put out a press release you’re going to the deli. You go in and shake a few hands. You come out, you talk to the press, you get in the cars and take off.” Beyond that, he did not have a clear strategy.

  On social issues, he was forced to play defense. In the first Republican debate at the Reagan Library, moderator Chris Matthews as
ked all the candidates, “Would the day that Roe v. Wade is repealed be a good day for Americans?” Romney: “Absolutely.” Sam Brownback: “Be a glorious day of human liberty and freedom.” Mike Huckabee: “Most certainly.” On down the line of candidates until it was Giuliani’s turn. “It would be okay,” he said. “Okay to repeal?” Matthews asked incredulously. “It would be okay to repeal,” Giuliani replied. “Or it would be okay also if a strict construc tionist judge viewed it as precedent, and I think a judge has to make that decision.”

  Later he tried to clarify his position. In a speech in Texas, he called abortion “morally wrong” but nonetheless said he believed the choice should be left to the woman. “I am open to seeking ways of limiting abortions and I am open to decreasing abortions,” he said. “But I believe you have to respect [women’s] viewpoint and give them a level of choice. I would grant women the right to make that choice.” The speech left all sides unhappy. Social conservatives saw a pro-abortion liberal. His former abortion rights allies in New York saw a turncoat. “I’m ashamed of him,” said Fran Reiter, who had been a deputy mayor under Giuliani and had run his 1997 reelection campaign.

  On May 17, at Lindsey Graham’s urging, McCain broke off the campaign to return to Washington. There he stood with a bipartisan group of senators, including Edward M. Kennedy, to announce support for a compromise immigration reform package. It came a year after he and many of the same senators had tried, with the president’s help, to enact legislation, only to see it blocked by Republicans. With the Democrats now in control of the House and Senate, and the president still behind the bill, the prospects for passage looked marginally better. But on June 28 the effort collapsed, once again sunk by the opposition of Republican lawmakers and a grassroots uprising fueled by talk radio and conservative constituencies around the country.

  Immigration, like health care and energy policy, was an example of how difficult it is to achieve public consensus on a controversial issue. In the country, the issue was a flashpoint, blocking compromise in Washington. As Doris Meissner, former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization commissioner, told us during the campaign, “Regardless of who wins the presidential election, the way the immigration issue is being handled makes it significantly more difficult to do some of the things we need to do once the election is over. It’s not like you can say, ‘Oh, this is one of those toxic eruptions and then you put it back in the bottle.’ We can’t put these things back in the bottle. Who wants to touch this thing after it has become the third rail of politics?”

  She added, “We have to have immigration for our long-term future. Until the last ten or fifteen years, immigration was basically an issue that affected five or six large states and the big cities in them. Now immigration is happening in very large ways in almost every state in the country—almost every state! The states that are particularly dramatic are so unlikely. South Carolina and Tennessee, Nevada and Iowa. When your foreign population [keeps increasing at such a rate] it is shocking. It’s all happening because of jobs, because these are all places that would be dying without new immigration and these communities are not set up to deal with it. And this is intensified by the fact that in all of these new growth areas, more than half, and sometimes seventy to eighty percent, of the people are illegal.”

  At this point, Meissner sat back and threw up her hands. “It makes me feel helpless,” she said. “I’ll be very honest with you. I feel like I have a responsibility to do something to combat this, and I don’t know what to do. This issue has completely run amok. It feels like anarchy.” Immigration, she said, “touches on everything, and goes everywhere. We could be setting the stage for these changes in our political campaign, but we’re doing exactly the opposite. Instead, nothing. Nothing! Not only nothing, but opening up a Pandora’s box and taking the lock off all the others. Now the creepy-crawlies are really out there.”

  McCain’s campaign sank further with the bill’s demise. Support in Iowa, tepid to begin with, collapsed. McCain recalled a town hall meeting he attended in Marshalltown, Iowa, where there had been a rapid influx of immigrants. “After my spiel a woman said why do we have to dial 1 for English?” he told us. “[She said] ‘These Mexicans are destroying our culture. Why can’t you make them all learn English?’ I mean it wasn’t even ‘our borders are broken,’ it was a genuine concern bordering on fear.”

  In New Hampshire, the morning of a Republican debate in early June, McCain warmed up with a town hall meeting at the fire station in Guilford but was hit repeatedly with immigration questions. That night, he found himself isolated as Romney, Giuliani, and several other rivals attacked him for supporting a bill they said would give amnesty to twelve million illegal immigrants living in the United States. McCain argued that doing nothing on immigration was worse and amounted to de facto amnesty.

  McCain said reaction to his candidacy on talk radio turned even more negative, with the hosts denouncing McCain’s bill as amnesty. “I remember being on talk shows and the host wouldn’t let me get a word in,” he said. “Then listening to the talk shows in the car: ‘Amnesty John’ and ‘Lindsey Gomez’ [a reference to Senator Lindsey Graham]. It became pretty apparent that the depth of the emotion on this issue was quite significant.”

  Tucker Bounds, a press spokesman, recalled “a half-empty fund-raiser in Sacramento. There were four or five gentlemen at a table that were outwardly confrontational with the candidate. And they had paid a thousand dollars to be there. They were argumentative with him about immigration policy inside his own fund-raiser in Sacramento. That was the point I realized we had a real problem on our hands.”

  Immigration savaged McCain’s fund-raising efforts. The campaign had raised little money in April, as the new finance team took hold, but still believed they could raise as much as $18 or $20 million in the second quarter, enough to erase questions about his political viability. Instead, they went into financial freefall. Fund-raising events were canceled because of lack of interest. Events projected to raise $200,000 pulled in half that amount or less. A bundler in California who had told Nelson he had pledges in April and early May for $100,000 couldn’t deliver 50 percent. “People were literally saying that they couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it, didn’t want to do it,” Nelson said. “[They] were going to wait to see what happened. That’s what you would hear.”

  Inside McCain headquarters, a grim reality now took hold. The campaign could no longer afford the superstructure that McCain’s team had constructed. McCain was hearing from others that the budgetary situation was dire. Greg Wendt, a wealthy mutual fund manager from San Francisco and McCain fund-raiser, said he began sounding alarms in March and April. Cindy McCain took a close look at the books and she too told her husband he had to act. “Cindy is a good business person,” Graham said. “She got into the books and showed John how some of this money was just quite frankly wasted.” McCain told us, “She became very alarmed at the fiscal status.”

  Nelson said that by mid-June he knew there would have to be major cuts in the staff. He told communications director Jones to come back with staff reductions for his department. Jones offered a list of three people. Nelson told him that wasn’t enough; his entire department had to be cut to three people.

  In early June, Nelson said, he laid out the details for McCain, who wanted to start cutting staff and expenses immediately. Nelson said, “You know what, if we do that, we’ll really impact our fund-raising, that there’s real downside risk in doing it. [I said] we’re going to save a couple hundred grand by laying some people off but we could lose some seven-figure number and we would take a hit in our fund-raising.”

  McCain reluctantly agreed but he was still terribly unhappy.

  On the weekend of June 30th, McCain hosted a gathering at his cabin in Sedona, Arizona. Many of the top fund-raisers were there. Nelson and Loeffler briefed them on the cuts that were coming. But there was considerable disagreement about what should be done to right the campaign. Before the meeting, Weaver and Cindy McCain ha
d gotten into an argument on the phone. She complained about the influence of the Bush network inside the campaign; Weaver said that the young staffers who would lose their jobs the next week had given their heart and soul to McCain and deserved better. They ended on an angry note.

  Throughout these days, McCain was continuing to hear from some of the fund-raisers that he needed to take more drastic steps, that he should get rid of Nelson and bring Davis back in as campaign manager. Weaver was tipped to these problems by Phil Gramm, the former Texas senator who was a friend and an economic adviser to McCain, before the Sedona meeting; in Arizona, Loeffler warned Nelson that McCain was in a bad mood.

  When McCain returned to Washington on Sunday, Salter came to his condominium for what others said was an emotional meeting. Salter told his boss that Nelson was thinking of tendering his resignation. McCain said he did not want that to happen. McCain was preparing for a trip to Iraq over the July Fourth holiday. On Monday, the day before his departure, Nelson and McCain met alone in McCain’s Senate office to review the staff cuts that would be announced on Tuesday. McCain made some minor changes in the plan and Nelson returned to the campaign headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, to begin to slash the staff. He was neither asked to resign nor did he volunteer to do so.

  Nelson, Weaver, and Salter delivered the bad news to the staff. “They just looked exhausted,” said Tucker Bounds. “I think they all realized, or believed at that point in time, that this was the beginning of a certain end to this campaign. That was the look on their faces, like this is the first part of how you put down a campaign. It’s a horse with a broken leg.”

  On Tuesday, Nelson and Weaver held a conference call with reporters to announce that the campaign had raised just $11.2 million in the second quarter and that cash on hand was just $2 million, pitifully low. In oblique terms they described the restructuring of the campaign, but offered no hint of the extent to which the reductions would decimate the operation. Nelson said the campaign was now considering applying for federal matching funds—a step that, if McCain were to win the nomination, would leave him financially crippled through the spring and summer of 2008 because of spending limits to which he would have to agree to get the federal money. Nelson told reporters, “We confronted reality and we dealt with it in the best way that we could, so that we can move forward with this campaign.”