Strategy shift boosts McCain

Top aide pushes tougher approach

STEPHEN CROWLEY/NEW YORK TIMES FILE PHOTOJohn McCain with newly promoted adviser Steve Schmidt, who has given the candidate's campaign a sharper focus. (STEPHEN CROWLEY/NEW YORK TIMES FILE PHOTO)

PHILADELPHIA - As the parties approach their national conventions, Republicans who had effectively conceded the year to Democrats are finding themselves heartened by John McCain's feisty resurgence in his duel with Barack Obama.

McCain supporters attribute the campaign's summertime transformation - which has been accompanied by small but steady gains in polls - to a more direct and disciplined operation, thanks in part to the newly promoted Steve Schmidt, an unapologetically ruthless veteran of the 2004 Bush campaign.

"People are very much encouraged by the new face of the campaign because they were not happy with the original theory of 'I'm not going to be aggressive, I'm not going to attack,' " said Charles Kopp, the campaign's mid-Atlantic finance chairman. "Everybody felt that if he did that he would have a tough time winning."

The months after McCain secured his party's nomination were filled with miscues, from the nationwide biographical "Service to America" tour - where at nearly every stop the candidate managed to overwhelm his life story by generating impromptu news by speaking to the press - to a much-maligned speech delivered before a sickly green backdrop on the same night that Obama declared himself his party's nominee to a lively arena crowd.

Since then, however, new focus is evident in a campaign that previously reflected McCain's instinct for improvisation. Public appearances been more ambitiously conceived and staged. The candidate and surrogates have been given instructions not only what to say, but also what not to do each day, according to a campaign adviser. Even the luggage handling is smoother, those who travel with McCain say.

Many around McCain attribute the improvements to McCain's decision in early July to promote Schmidt, a veteran of Bush's White House and 2004 campaign rapid-response team, to a top role overseeing all strategy and operations. Schmidt replaced Rick Davis, who had also managed McCain's 2000 effort.

A longtime informal adviser to McCain, Schmidt arrived at the candidate's side in January and quickly made his take-no-prisoners presence known. In the closing days before Florida's primary, McCain accused Mitt Romney of supporting a schedule for "withdrawal" from Iraq - based on a single nine-month-old clip of a Romney television appearance that many news organizations concluded had been twisted out of its context.

Romney accused McCain of practicing "Nixon era" tactics, but since Schmidt's promotion in July Republicans have reveled in the rough-and-tumble style. Yet McCain is not necessarily any more negative now than he was before: He has been delivering biting critiques of Obama's character for months, but they were often buried beneath literary flourishes, and they rarely identified their target by name.

As early as February, McCain said in one primary-night speech that he rejected "the presumption that I am blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save my country in its hour of need."

Much of McCain's spring was spent with dutiful tours - to foreign capitals and to domestic sites designed to highlight the arc of McCain's life and his willingness to approach nontraditional Republican constituencies - and policy proclamations that generated relatively little media coverage against the lively Democratic primary race.

"They went ahead and laid the foundation under Rick, and it was time to whack somebody under Steve," said Roy Fletcher, who served as McCain's deputy campaign manager in 2000.

Since Schmidt's ascendance, the attacks have been far less roundabout. For the last month, McCain - through his comments, through the comments of prominent supporters, and through ads - has consistently tried to paint Obama as a vacuous, self-serving celebrity comparable to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, putting himself first rather than "Country First" (a new McCain slogan).

"Life in the spotlight must be grand, but for the rest of us times are tough," declared one recent McCain ad, over an image of Obama addressing a crowd. The cheeky tone evoked the devastating "windsurfing" ad Schmidt had helped conceive against John Kerry four years earlier.

"Once he joined the club, the advertising changed, and immediately they got with drawing the distinctions," Fletcher said of Schmidt. "I know Schmidt's got a rule that you do positive and negative at the same time. But I haven't seen much of the positive."

McCain has also managed to seize control of the debate over rising energy prices. He abruptly changed his position to favor offshore drilling and began to attack Obama as "Dr. No" for opposing it, while aides distributed "Obama's Energy Plan" tire gauges to lampoon the Democrat's suggestion that consumers could take initiative in lowering their fuel costs.

The efforts appear to have affected voters' impressions of Obama, whose sizable lead in early summer polls has shrunk as the conventions approach. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released this week showed that 48 percent of registered voters viewed Obama favorably, down from 59 percent in June, while those with negative impressions of him increased from 27 percent to 35 percent.

In addition, while there is evidence of an enduring gap in enthusiasm between the parties, polls show that McCain is now as popular among Republicans as Obama is with Democrats.

Both aides and independent analysts have pointed to McCain's blunt performance at last weekend's Saddleback Church gathering of evangelical Christians as evidence that better message control can help McCain attract voters who may have had differences with him on matters of both policy and style.

"Just by McCain being McCain and giving the answers he does, he'll reassure a lot of people," said Charlie Black, a McCain strategist.