But before all that, McCain's comeback was largely engineered by a team that grew out of the summer collapse, who are jokingly called the "Sedona five" because of their strategy sessions at McCain's Arizona cabin.
Davis, a calm and efficient lobbyist who impressed everyone with his budgeting skills, manned the northern Virginia headquarters. Salter, 53, who in his younger days spent four years as an Iowa spiker laying railroad tracks before becoming McCain's speechwriter, was most often at McCain's side.
Black, a lobbyist who initially signed on as debate coach, was drafted onto the Straight Talk Express bus by McCain as his tactician and, at 60, as the "wise elder of the group." Schmidt, 37, a strategist who ran the 2004 Bush campaign war room, and McKinnon, a one-time songwriter who served as media strategist for President Bush's White House campaigns, parachuted in from their respective bases in California and Austin.
They stayed "because of the candidate -- with really very little prospect of winning," said McKinnon, 52. "For a lot of us, we wanted to stay just to help the old soldier get some of his medals back."
A second chance
They set modest goals in late summer. McCain was still sliding in the polls and getting buried by the press; his advisors told him to stay under the radar while Davis straightened out the finances.
Davis drafted a memo for donors showing how they would downsize the campaign's far-flung operations -- focusing on a serviceable finish in Iowa and a win in New Hampshire to accelerate the campaign to the early states of Michigan, South Carolina and Florida.
He and Black assured them, along with McCain's high-profile endorsers, that the campaign "didn't need that much money." Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, even Michigan, were not expensive media states. "Nothing was secret," said Davis, who is 50. "That gave them something to focus on."
For Davis, who had often been left on the sidelines of campaign strategy sessions by then-campaign manager Terry Nelson and consultant John Weaver, being elevated to the top job gave him a second chance to get McCain to the White House.
"I felt like we cheated history by not doing a good enough job getting [McCain] elected [in 2000]," Davis said. "I was dying for another crack at it."
To improve morale and communication, Davis moved the entire staff into one long room, dubbed "the pit," where the finance, communications and planning teams worked alongside one another.
