From the current New York magazine:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/51016/index1.html * By John Heilemann
* Published Oct 5, 2008
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It’s important to remember that just a few months ago, at the conclusion of the Democratic primaries, McCain and Obama stood on roughly level footing with the press. “They were both media darlings,” says Marion Just, a Wellesley professor and consultant to the Project for Excellence in Journalism who studies campaign coverage. “The salient question was which of them would benefit more in the general election.”
McCain’s darlinghood was largely a vestige of his 2000 race in the Republican primaries, when his challenge to George W. Bush and the GOP Establishment, his reformist stances, and, not least, his freewheeling open-access press policy on the Straight Talk Express earned him countless fans among inky-fingered wretches. He emerged from that campaign, despite having lost, as the most popular politician in the nation, and his defiance of Bush on matters such as torture, taxes, and campaign finance only enhanced his stature in the media as a different kind of politician. “His meta-narrative,” says Just, “is that he was authentic, a man of integrity, a man of high moral character.” Or, as McCain’s chief strategist, John Weaver, puts it, “John was the Good Housekeeping seal of approval in American politics.”
But in the middle of the summer, the McCain campaign took a series of steps that appeared on their face to be at odds with the candidate’s gold-plated brand. In the interest of greater message discipline, his advisers eliminated his running back-of-the-bus (or front-of-the-plane) bullshit sessions with reporters. And they turned sharply negative in their approach to Obama, hammering him with a series of ads—seen by some as trivial and trivializing, by others as racially coded, and eventually by most as unexpectedly effective—focused on his status as a celebrity unqualified to be commander-in-chief.
Much of this departure from the modus operandi of “the old McCain” was chalked up to Schmidt, who had run the Bush war room under Karl Rove in 2004 and who believed that running hard negative against Obama was McCain’s only chance to win. But many longtime McCain watchers say that the candidate’s own gathering sense of frustration made him ripe for such a change. “It offended him that Obama walked away from his promise to do town-hall debates—and that the press didn’t seem to care,” says Dan Schnur, McCain’s 2000 communications director. “And then he did a series of nontraditional campaign events, like his poverty tour, and was alternately ignored or mocked by the media. And my guess is that gave Steve much greater leverage in saying, ‘Let’s try a different approach.’ ”
Whatever the reasoning, the strategists behind McCain’s 2000 run, Weaver and Mike Murphy, immediately voiced their disquiet over the potential long-term damage to the image they’d so carefully crafted. “There is no brand in politics you can just put on the shelf, run a campaign totally contrary to it, and then take it down later and still expect people to believe it,” Weaver told me at the time. “I just hope it’s still there for them when they need it.”
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