Fifteen people showed up at one of the first events. But some in McCain's inner circle felt the tour drew an important contrast with Romney, who was being pounded with allegations he'd shifted his positions to suit his political fortunes. McCain's oft-repeated line hinted at that -- "I'd rather lose a campaign than a war."
Schmidt believed the tour showed McCain "as someone who wasn't a quitter, someone who was tough, who was going to hang in there and fight for what he believed in. . . . It gave him oxygen in the race," Schmidt said.
As McCain worked toward what would become 101 town halls before the New Hampshire primary, his poll numbers tilted slightly upward.
Telling the right story
With money still tight, Schmidt and McCain argued that they needed to follow up the tour with television ads in October -- reintroducing the candidate as a veteran, prisoner of war in North Vietnam and principled maverick. McKinnon, who had bonded with McCain in 2004 when the senator campaigned for Bush, resisted.
"We were just operating on pennies," McKinnon said. He worried that if they aired ads so early, "we could wake up in a couple weeks and be flat broke -- and have no choice but to get out of the race." But he gave in, agreeing to "roll the dice."
McKinnon had seen the black-and-white footage of McCain as a prisoner of war with broken limbs, lying in a hospital bed, smoking a cigarette. "I knew immediately it was some of the most powerful footage I'd ever seen in my life as an advertising guy."
But McCain thought it made him look vulnerable and didn't want to use it. McKinnon drafted Salter to "go into the propellers to say, 'Senator, we've got to do this.' . . . Salter is always our hole card when we want to get something done," McKinnon said. It worked.
McKinnon put together a small, mostly unpaid group he called Foxhole Productions and drafted Salter as a copy writer. They traded scripts over e-mail and wrote one during a late evening at a Florida hotel bar after a debate. McKinnon and his team cut the 11-minute version of McCain's biographical film for $5,000. (McKinnon's equivalent bio film for Bush cost $100,000.)
Voters frequently told McCain that they were most moved by a spot McKinnon's team made about a compassionate North Vietnamese guard who tended to McCain as a prisoner of war. As McCain tells the story, the man silently reached out to him one Christmas by drawing a cross in the dirt outside McCain's cell.
