Mark Salter: McCain's Closest Aide | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008

CAMPAIGN 2008
Hackers and Spending Sprees
11/5/2008 12:00:00 AM
The computer systems of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were victims of a sophisticated cyberattack by an unknown "foreign entity," prompting a federal investigation, NEWSWEEK reports today.
APPRECIATION
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
David Gates 9/14/2008 12:00:00 AM
When the news came that David Foster Wallace, only 46-years old, had hanged himself in his home in California, I opened his masterpiece, the 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," at random and happened to land on a scene in which a recovering drug addict recalls a childhood moment of existential dread. "It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. It was the worst thing I have ever confronted . . . I understood on an intuitive level why people kill themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling, I'd surely kill myself." We'll surely be spotting more and more of these clues in his work: some writers—Hemingway was one—seem to take years composing their suicide notes right under our very noses. In Wallace's last book, a story collection called "Oblivion"—oh, now we get it—the self-tormenting protagonist of "Good Old Neon," an ad man who has felt like a "fraud" his whole life (and who used to know one "David Wallace" when he was a kid) swallows antihistamines and drives his car into a bridge abutment. And in Wallace's commencement address to the class of 2005 at Kenyon College, he dragged in—if not exactly out of left field, certainly out of left center—"the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master . . . It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."
CAMPAIGN 2008
Here We Go Again
Evan Thomas 8/2/2008 12:00:00 AM
Campaign staffers and paid consultants can be patronizing to the candidates they "handle." In the cynical view of the wise guys who run campaigns, the candidates are softhearted amateurs who can't be trusted not to wander from the disciplined message of the day, or who become all mushy and weak-kneed when it's time to attack the opponent. This seems to have been the attitude toward John McCain in some quarters of his campaign in recent days. A front-page article last week in The Washington Post was headlined AS AIDES MAP AGGRESSIVE RACE, MCCAIN OFTEN STEERS OFF-COURSE. The article was likely fed by Republican Party operatives who were frustrated by McCain's tendency to undercut or talk over his attack lines by being a candid or forgiving human being. When McCain offhandedly described Obama's plan to withdraw troops from Iraq in 16 months as a "pretty good timetable," GOP advisers moaned that he was ruining his attack on Obama as naive on foreign policy. The problem, in the view of campaign strategists, isn't the message—bashing Obama as arrogant and out of touch. Rather, "it's the candidate," says a "GOP strategist with close ties to the campaign," anonymously quoted by the Post.
CAMPAIGN 2008
Yanking Our Chain?
Jonathan Alter 7/22/2008 12:00:00 AM
"What do you want, you little jerks?"
IMMIGRATION
Why Won’t Juan Come to the Phone?
Jessica Ramirez and Holly Bailey 7/19/2008 12:00:00 AM
The job of Juan Hernandez is to win support for John McCain, particularly Latino votes. So it may seem odd that the campaign doesn't want its national director of Hispanic outreach to get any press. Repeated NEWSWEEK requests to interview Hernandez have been rebuffed or ignored. When a reporter suggested talking to Hernandez at a convention of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, where Hernandez was slated to appear June 28, his name was suddenly removed from the list of scheduled speakers. A NALEO spokesman, Eric Wagner, says someone from the McCain campaign called and asked to replace him, but didn't offer an explanation. (A McCain aide, who refused to be quoted discussing internal campaign strategy, later told NEWSWEEK that the campaign had never signed off on Hernandez as a speaker.)
CAMPAIGN 2008
Finding His Faith
Lisa Miller 7/12/2008 12:00:00 AM
In 1981 Barack Obama was 20 years old, a Columbia University student in search of the meaning of life. He was torn a million different ways: between youth and maturity, black and white, coasts and continents, wonder and tragedy. He enrolled at Columbia in part to get far away from his past; he'd gone to high school in Hawaii and had just spent two years "enjoying myself," as he puts it, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In New York City, "I lived an ascetic existence," Obama told NEWSWEEK in an interview on his campaign plane last week. "I did a lot of spiritual exploration. I withdrew from the world in a fairly deliberate way." He fasted. Often, he'd go days without speaking to another person.