McCain’s almost willful tendency to step all over his scripted lines exasperated his aides. Before Obama left on a widely anticipated overseas trip in mid-July, the McCain camp tried to orchestrate a counterattack. Jill Hazelbaker went on Fox TV’s morning show to mock Obama. “Let’s drop the pretense that this is a fact-finding trip and call it what it is: the first-of-its-kind campaign rally overseas.” She called the trip “one giant photo opportunity.” But McCain promptly told reporters that he disagreed with Hazelbaker and that he would speak to her about it. McCain said he was “glad” that Obama was going to Iraq and Afghanistan to see for himself. Hazelbaker was so upset that she did not come to work the next day and refused to take McCain’s apologetic phone calls. Schmidt told the candidate in no uncertain terms that he had to change. McCain, for once, seemed to get the message.
On July 24, after touring the Middle East and Europe, meeting with foreign leaders and generally impressing the American and international press, Obama spoke to a huge crowd in Berlin. His campaign was eager to strike echoes of John F. Kennedy traveling to Berlin in 1963, the vibrant young leader thrilling the world with his defiance of Soviet communism. An advance team looked into the possibility of Obama’s speaking at the Brandenburg Gate, near the place where Ronald Reagan had challenged the Soviets to “tear down this wall!” in the last days of the cold war. But Obama vetoed the site. He did not want to appear “presumptuous,” he told David Axelrod, by speaking at a site normally reserved for heads of state. Still, he ended up speaking on a raised platform before the soaring Victory Column, not too far from the Brandenburg Gate, and the effect was both dramatic and grand.
Sen. Lindsey Graham was watching on TV. McCain’s friend, who had sharp political instincts, saw an opportunity. As he later recalled, he thought, “Oh, boy,” as he reached for the phone to call McCain. “Look at this!” he exclaimed to the candidate, who was also watching. “Who the hell does this guy think he is? And who are all those Germans, and what are they cheering about?” To Graham, Obama’s speech was all about Obama, grandstanding for a bunch of foreigners.
Other McCain advisers were having similar thoughts and inspirations. That weekend, the senior strategy team met at a hotel near McCain’s house in Phoenix to ponder how to turn Obama’s big moment against him. McCain, his wife and Graham joined at the end of the meeting to see what they had come up with.
Schmidt took the lead. Obama was flying so high that McCain’s guns could barely reach him, he said. So the answer was … make him fly a little higher, until the voters saw that he really was nothing more than a hot-air balloon. “This guy is acting like a celebrity,” Schmidt said. “He is a celebrity. Only celebrities draw 200,000 people. Presidents do, too, but he’s not a president. He’s the biggest celebrity in the world. OK, let’s give him that. Let him have that. But then we get to ask, do you want a celebrity running the country?”
Graham immediately perked up. “That’s great!” he exclaimed. McCain nodded. “Yeah,” he said. Schmidt quickly got to work on an ad. On July 30, the “celebrity” ad went up and was quickly flashed around the country on news shows and YouTube. “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world,” a breathy announcer declares, while images of Obama’s Berlin speech are juxtaposed with shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.
Most pundits huffed at the ad as trivial and a cheap shot. But it dominated the news cycle for several days, something McCain had failed to do for months. Obama didn’t get much of a bounce from his trip, despite the heavy, overwhelmingly admiring press coverage. The ad had helped stall Obama’s momentum and, with some voters, raise doubts about his depth of experience. Schmidt’s status rose: his chippy, in-your-face attack mode seemed to work.
Still, McCain’s own adman, Mike Hudome, was unsettled. He told a NEWSWEEK reporter that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were not his style. Friends and colleagues would stop him and say, “Hey, Mike, the celebrity spot?” Hudome would hasten to tell them that the spot was all Schmidt’s doing. Hudome liked Schmidt, but he felt bad about the direction of the campaign; under Schmidt, it was being run more like a traditional political campaign, going negative and sticking to the sound bites. He worried that the campaign was forfeiting “the real McCain maverick message.” And yet he had to concede the ad worked.
McCain himself seemed grouchy and unhappy on the campaign trail. He was doing fewer town-hall meetings, and his aides, upset when no one laughed at the candidate’s tried and-true jokes at one particularly sorry affair in Belleville, Mich., decided they’d better start packing the hall with McCainiacs. (The audience was full of undecided and skeptical voters; the campaign had been trying to make a point with the press and Obama by daring to plunge the candidate into true arenas of democracy—i.e., before unscreened voters.) Before long, McCain’s “town halls” were almost as tame as George W. Bush’s in 2004, when the president spoke to by-invitation-only crowds.
McCain chafed at his handlers from time to time. But as one close aide explained to a NEWSWEEK reporter, he did not mind sudden course shifts in his campaign. He was a fighter pilot, an improviser, not a “steady as she goes” sailor. All through his political career, he had been willing to tack away from the fleet. He was regarded as quirky and unpredictable by his stodgier, more conventionally partisan colleagues. McCain may have bridled at doing fewer town-hall meetings or cutting off the press, but he was able to reconcile any qualms about going negative by regarding change—in this case, a tougher, sharper-edged approach—as not only necessary but desirable. “There aren’t very many politicians who are instinctively as good as John at saying, ‘I got it. New campaign? No problem’,” said a close adviser. “His whole career is all over the map. This is not like Ronald Reagan—’Here’s what I believe, I’ve never changed in 20 years.’ This is John McCain, so change is a little bit quicker. He’s like, ‘OK’.”
McCain did not, in any case, resist taking a few jabs at Obama. McCain did not really respect his opponent. He can be forgiving, but he can also hold a grudge, and for him politics is deeply personal. He felt that he had been betrayed by Obama in the Senate, and that Obama, as he put it, lacked guts (a critical test to the macho McCain). McCain’s […continued on page 5]