McCain supporters buoyed by campaign’s aggressive new tone

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.

”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.“