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When McCain finally decided to embark on an '08 campaign, he once again turned to Weaver to helm it. But Weaver had no intention of replaying McCain's 2000 bid. Although he had taken McCain's defeat harder than perhaps any other McCainiac--actually becoming a Democrat for a time--Weaver believed that the road to victory lay in following the Bush model. It was almost as if the lesson he took away from the defeat was, if you can't beat them, join them. He set out to construct a front-runner's campaign like Bush's in 2004 and hired top talent from that effort. Steve Schmidt, who directed Bush's rapid-response operation, was brought on as communications chief, and Mark McKinnon, who'd been Bush's media man, was tapped to cut spots. Most importantly, Weaver hired Terry Nelson, Bush '04's political director, to serve as campaign manager--Davis's old gig.
But there was one personnel decision that Weaver didn't control. McCain named Davis the campaign's CEO, or chief money-raiser; rather than cast Davis out, McCain offered him a consolation prize. His Solomonic decision backfired: Weaver and Davis's animosity proved too deep, and the McCain campaign soon reverted to tribalism. One problem was that Davis still wasn't content to be a mere fund-raiser. As Weaver and Nelson worked from the top-down Bush playbook, Davis pushed for a radically decentralized campaign, with regional offices around the country--going so far, at one point, as to line up space in Beverly Hills and Manhattan before Weaver and Nelson quashed the idea. But the bigger problem was that the factionalism created a situation in which the people raising the money (who reported to Davis) didn't communicate with the people spending it (who reported to Weaver), and the campaign soon faced a cash crunch, as inputs didn't keep pace with outputs. "Whoever heard of setting up a system where the strategic and political arms are so separate from the finance arm that they don't know how much money they're raising and can't be told?" asks one Republican strategist. "And that's the system McCain set up, because he didn't want anyone to get their feelings hurt."
