McCain orders shake-up of his campaign

There were other signs that Republicans were trying to get back on track in the fight with Senator Obama. The Republican National Committee this week formed an independent expenditure committee to run advertisements on behalf of Mr. McCain. The committee bought time for advertisements this weekend in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, said Democrats who monitor the purchases.

Charlie Black , one of Mr. McCain’s senior advisers and an ally of Mr. Davis, described the changes as a retooling before the general election. Mr. Black said that Mr. Schmidt would be the chief operating officer of the campaign, serving under Mr. Davis, in charge mostly of helping Mr. McCain settle on a message and get it out with speeches, advertisements and surrogate events.

“He is going to be the chief choreographer,” Mr. Black said of Mr. Schmidt.

Yet by every appearance — including the broad portfolio Mr. McCain has handed Mr. Schmidt — it is clear that he is running the operation, Republicans involved in the campaign said.

Mr. Schmidt, 37, is one of the most intense, hard-driving figures in his party today: when he worked for Mr. Bush, his nickname in the campaign was “The Bullet,” a reference to the shape of his shaved head.

He has been at the center of some of the most politically significant Republican operations of the last 10 years. In working with Mr. Rove and Ken Mehlman , the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Schmidt has become immersed in the use of data-driven methods to find and turn out Republican voters.

He also ran the Bush campaign’s war room, which was responsible for capitalizing on mistakes of opponents. Mr. McCain’s advisers said that one sign of Mr. Schmidt’s increasing influence in the campaign’s rapid response operation was the quickness with which it seized on a remark by Gen. Wesley K. Clark questioning whether Mr. McCain’s experience as a naval aviator shot down over Vietnam had qualified him to be president.

Mr. Schmidt ran the successful re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger , the California Republican who won in a Democratic state by embracing moderate positions on issues like the environment and gay rights.

Mr. Schmidt also served as communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, a job that presumably offered him the kind of district-by-district political education that could prove helpful in making decisions about where to send Mr. McCain and what he should talk about.

The shift comes after what even Mr. McCain’s aides acknowledged has been a squandered period of time since he claimed the nomination in February. Mr. McCain spent Wednesday in Colombia, his second overseas trip in a week, and one that he took despite the urging of Republicans who said he needed to convey his concerns about domestic problems to voters at home.

“Somebody asked, ‘What’s the strategy behind this?’ ” Mr. Black said of the foreign travel. “It’s simple. McCain says he wants to go to these places, and we say, of course.”

But, Mr. Black added, the trip should help to underline “one of the big contrasts in this race: Obama wants to become the first protectionist president in our history since Herbert Hoover.”

This story, McCain orders shake-up of his campaign, originally appeared in The New York Times.

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