to Schmidt’s skeptical view of the press. Once, after Salter refused to let a couple of snarky bloggers aboard the Straight Talk Express, Schmidt called him with congratulations for staying firm. The two advisers had finally managed to persuade McCain to stop reading the political coverage of The New York Times after he had been irked by a couple of critical stories in late September.
Salter never criticized Schmidt, either to other reporters or within the campaign. He wanted to honor McCain’s admonition against backbiting by his top advisers, and the two remained close friends. With a NEWSWEEK reporter, Schmidt rebuffed media gossip that he had grown apart from Salter. But he spent less time kicking back with him, in part because Schmidt was more often in headquarters than on the road. One evening at the bar, when Schmidt came over and a gaggle of reporters quickly turned their attention away from Salter (who was a familiar presence) and to Schmidt (who was not), Salter cracked that “Schmidt never joins a conversation. He commandeers it.”
Though he denied it to NEWSWEEK, Salter seemed troubled by the campaign’s relentlessly negative tone. The Obama campaign was not exactly running on sweetness and light—at least a third of Obama’s ads attacked McCain. The Obama campaign did not hesitate to imply, through its choice of language, that McCain’s “erratic” actions might have something to do with his advanced age. Obama’s admen used the shameless old Democratic trick of trying to scare elderly voters by suggesting, based on little evidence, that McCain planned to cut their Social Security benefits in half. But by early October, virtually all of McCain’s ads were negative. The press was increasingly painting him as a bitter old man. This seemed to pain Salter, who had worked so hard to craft a heroic, selfless image of John McCain—the idealization that McCain himself had wanted to live up to, but now seemed to be putting at risk by traveling the low road.
Salter was particularly aggrieved by a McCain ad suggesting that Obama wanted sex education taught to preschoolers. He predicted, correctly, that The New York Times would jump all over the ad and lambaste McCain. But no one on the senior team seemed to care what The New York Times wrote anymore. Schmidt wanted to kick the Gray Lady off the campaign plane for good. Though polling suggested that such a move would play well with the GOP base, Salter vehemently protested that it would be foolish to cut off the Times, and Schmidt backed off.
One of McCain’s advisers said of Salter, “We call him McCain’s wife.” As one senior adviser explained it, “I’ve done a lot of campaigns … and the candidate’s wife is always a bit of a problem. The candidate’s wife, her job is different from everyone else’s. Our job is for Candidate X to win. The candidate’s wife’s job is always to protect the candidate. Those two goals are often in conflict.” A NEWSWEEK reporter asked the strategist if Salter was just reflecting McCain’s preferences. “If that were a true husband and wife, how would you know?” the adviser answered. As for McCain’s actual wife, “she has not been one bit of a problem. I’m a big Cindy fan.”
In mid-October, one senior adviser noted to the NEWSWEEK reporter, “Of late there has been more separation between [Salter] and Steve [Schmidt] because, I think, he thinks we are taking McCain down a path that we shouldn’t. And quite frankly, we are. It’s the difference between scorched earth and having as little collateral damage as possible.”
The Palin media rollout was a particularly destructive weapon. Vice presidential candidates often act as attackers, allowing their running mates to float above the fray. But Palin’s exuberant assaults on Obama ended up dragging McCain into the middle of the fight, where he seemed decidedly uncomfortable.
Palin was being handled by Nicolle Wallace, a veteran of the hardball politics of the Bush-Cheney campaign (she had been a press-bashing director of communications). Recruited by Schmidt, Wallace had come from a stint as a commentator at CBS. She had the disastrous idea of making Palin available only for a series of high-profile media interviews, and then overprepared her with a cram course of talking points. It was embarrassing to watch Palin grope for answers to Katie Couric’s questions—and thanks to YouTube, more than 10 million voters witnessed it. “She is not a dumb person,” said a senior McCain adviser. “She is an intelligent person, but we made her so uptight.” Some old McCain hands on the campaign were sharply critical of the Bush-Cheney alumni brought onboard by Schmidt. Wallace and the others had not only botched the handling of Palin, in the view of the old McCainiacs; they didn’t understand that McCain needed to be McCain. (Wallace took responsibility, in an edgy kind of way: “I keep trying to get someone to write that it’s my stupid strategy,” she told a NEWSWEEK reporter. “I should be fired. I’ve offered my resignation twice in the spirit of Dwight D. Eisenhower, taking responsibility, and no one will take it.” In truth, Wallace was in a tough place: Palin was no longer taking much coaching from her. Feeling that she had been overmanaged for her one-on-one debut with a network anchor—Charlie Gibson of ABC—Palin had rebuffed Wallace’s help with her Couric interview.)
Palin skillfully handled her debate with Joe Biden by essentially ignoring the questions posed by the “media elite” (PBS’s Gwen Ifill, the moderator). And she was rousing at rallies of true believers. “God bless America, you guys get it!” she enthused a few minutes after 9 on a muggy October morning in Clearwater, Fla. An enormous American flag was suspended on a crane over her head. “Drill, baby, drill!” screamed the virtually all-white crowd of several thousand. She started in on Obama. “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America,” she said.
She brought up William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber who was acquainted with Obama through Chicago politics. “I’m afraid that this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who targeted his own people.”
In tailored jackets and skirts, she was glamorous and tastefully sexy (Politico reported that the McCain campaign spent $150,000 to dress her and her family). She was speaking […continued on page 5]