Campaign Diaries

When John McCain wrapped up the GOP nomination on Super Tuesday, some Democrats worried that the Republican would have so much time to prepare himself for the general election, shake-up his staff, organize his campaign structure, choose the message he wants to embody and the themes he wants to relay — and do all of it discreetly, with the media preoccupied with every single incident in the Obama-Clinton contest.

It was thus surprising to learn yesterday that McCain was shaking up his staff, exactly a year after the departure of most senior officials of his campaign almost killed his candidacy. Steve Schmidt will take control of the daily operations of the McCain campaign, meaning that he will be in charge of scheduling and of the message the candidate will focus on. This is essentially a power-sharing agreement with Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager.

It should be noted that this is not as dramatic a shake-up as last year’s and that the campaign is deliberately playing it up. After all, it looks like Schmidt has been increasing his power for a while now, Davis is not leaving the campaign and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of hostility between the two men. So why make sure that this is covered now? As Adam Nagourney points out, McCain’s campaign events were poorly planned over the past few weeks, as fundraising duties were mixed up with messaging considerations, which ended up muddying the narratives the campaign wanted to tell and prevented them from truly owning an issue:

By contrast, in appearances that drew widespread derision from Republicans — and cheers of delight from Democrats — Mr. McCain delivered a speech last month in which he came out in favor of offshore drilling first before an audience of oil executives in Houston, and repeated it in a speech in Santa Barbara, Calif., a locale long identified with opposition to offshore drilling.

Republicans were increasingly anxious about their candidate’s organization and the media was increasingly catching on that theme. Politico published an article on Tuesday titled “McCain game plan worries insiders: “The bulk of those interviewed expressed serious concern about what has appeared to be an aimless campaign so far, one that has failed to take advantage of a four-month head start on Democrats and has showed little sign of gaining traction.”

It was important for McCain to show he was doing something about it and Schmidt is meant to get the campaign to focus and to get the candidate to continue morphing into the costume of a presidential candidate. In many ways, this is undoubtedly a move McCain needed to make.

But it is hard not to think that this shake-up is coming months after it should have. McCain had four months to put in place a well-oiled campaign and changing the entire chain of command at the beginning of July betrays poor preparation. And judging by Jonathan Martin’s report in Politico, not everyone in the GOP world has clearly understood what the chain of command will be, which is not a good sign this close to Election Day.

Furthermore, while Schmidt’s upgrade by itself does not mean sudden and profoud upheaval, he will bring with him a number of swift changes and the first one that is being reported is a big one: the campaign is throwing out regional managers campaign structure. Davis had set up an entirely decentralized campaign: regional managers would make decisions on messaging and ad buys without reporting to anyone. This was an entirely novel structure and, while some GOP operatives remained skeptical, the McCain campaign pressed ahead and appointed its 15 regional managers. But yesterday’s shake-up apparently repudiates the plan: A national director is coming on board to oversee the activities of each of the 15 regional managers, centralizing the campaign and doing away with the Davis plan.

But is it not getting very late for such a complete overhaul of the campaign structure? It would be understandable if Obama were doing such changes now, since he just wrapped up the Democratic nomination. But McCain’s camp has been thinking about how to best organize a campaign since February, and had been celebrating this decentralized campaign structure as an innovation with great potential.

The shake-up of July 2nd 2008 might not be as dramatic as those of July 2nd 2007, but they certainly do not inspire confidence in what McCain has been doing over the past five months. Republicans better hope that this round of changes boosts the Arizona Senator as much as the 2007 series.