The campaign slashed many salaries, top aides worked without pay, and virtually everyone had to fill multiple roles. Field organizers handled advance for McCain's events. National press secretary Brooke Buchanan also became McCain's on-the-road secretary, coffee fetcher and occasional baggage hauler.
In an organization that had once spent money on luxuries like a snow plow to clear the way for McCain's bus, Davis issued a mandate that the campaign would never spend more in a week than it raised. Every Friday afternoon, the finance team sorted through requests. "Ninety-five percent of people [Davis] talked to, he was telling them 'No,' " Black recalled.
The campaign stopped building its own events and trawled for invitations. "If you went to a Rotary in Manchester [N.H.], it didn't cost you anything," Davis said. "So we went to a lot of Rotary Clubs. . . . The philosophy in July, August, September and October was: Don't spend money unless you absolutely needed it."
When McCain inched up in polls in the fall, aides called from Iowa begging: "Could you just give us something?" But "every decision had to be subordinate to winning New Hampshire," Salter said.
Back in the headlines
The political team wanted McCain back in the headlines by September. They knew attention would be on General David H. Petraeus' report to Congress on the Iraq troop buildup and another debate over withdrawal from Iraq.
When McCain pressed for the buildup in the early days of his candidacy, pollsters admonished his team to "get away from it." But McCain's trip to Iraq in July with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham convinced him the increase was working. "What would be the point of asking him to walk away from it? You'd get nothing but an earful," Salter said.
Schmidt, who'd handled Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s controversial Supreme Court nomination for the White House and rescued Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2006 reelection campaign at a time when the governor's approval rating was in the 30s, thought McCain's only way out was to "get into the arena," one senior aide recalls.
Schmidt, McCain and Graham decided on a string of events highlighting the troop buildup, in which McCain would travel with veterans and fellow prisoners of war beginning Sept. 11 in Iowa, and moving on to New Hampshire and South Carolina. "We had our share of experts telling us we were out of our minds" to keep the focus on Iraq, Davis said.
