No Prize to the Noble Loser

If you want to really irritate Steve Schmidt (and seeing that he's 6 feet, 225 pounds, and can show a flash of temper, it's not recommended), just compare him to Karl Rove. The man in charge of John McCain's day-to-day presidential campaign is tired of reporters saying he's Rove's "protégé"—the implication being that he is willing to do anything to win. For the record: the two men go back only to 2004, when Schmidt, then a 34-year-old consultant, was hired to run George W. Bush's re-election war room.

Schmidt learned then what it means to play rough when your candidate is behind. Now, four years later, he is back at it. McCain is down in the polls, and the candidate has struggled to get a consistent message across to voters. When that happened to Bush in 2000 and 2004, Rove unleashed meaner speeches and uglier campaign ads. Under Schmidt's direction, McCain is doing the same. In recent weeks, as Barack Obama has pulled further ahead—the new NEWSWEEK Poll has Obama up by 11 points among registered voters—Schmidt has ordered a barrage of negative ads attacking the Democratic candidate. McCain's once sunny town-hall script has turned darker. Sarah Palin—whom Schmidt helped persuade McCain to pick as his running mate—is playing her Schmidt-sanctioned pit-bull role with great success. She often works crowds into an anti-Obama frenzy. (During a Palin speech in Florida last week, a man in the audience allegedly shouted, "Kill him!" The Secret Service is investigating.)

In GOP circles, Schmidt's nickname is "The Bullet," both for his gleaming shaved head and the way he relentlessly seeks out his target. (When he can, he lets off steam at the gym by practicing Ultimate Fighting techniques.) His specialty is message control, something McCain, a meandering speaker, has worked to master. Schmidt's signature practice is to pick a simple message and repeat it day after day until it begins to sink in with the public. In Obama's case, it's that he is an empty celebrity who lacks the gravitas to lead. The rock-star ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton? That was all Schmidt. "He may be the best pure message consultant I've ever worked with, and I've worked with every big-deal political consultant," says Mark McKinnon, a former McCain adviser. "He can focus like a monk in a hurricane. And while he can whip up a storm of tactics to confuse and distract the opposition, he thinks very strategically." It's not tough to see why the Rove comparison keeps cropping up.

But unlike Rove, who appears to relish and even play up his Prince of Darkness rep, Schmidt—who declined to be interviewed for this story—seems genuinely pained that this is the way things have turned out. He isn't pure or a dreamy-eyed idealist; he was hired to win, and he has shown he's not averse to punching or getting elastic with facts. In politics, no prize goes to the noble loser. That doesn't mean he has to like being known as a practitioner of the political dark arts. Schmidt came to work for McCain with a very different vision of what big-league politics could be—and it didn't look anything like the nasty and brutish campaign he now finds himself working like hell not to lose.

After Bush won in '04, Schmidt took a job at the White House working for Dick Cheney. The vice president had the worst persona in politics—his popularity was in the low 20s—and Schmidt was given the unenviable task of giving the dour, secretive vice president a personality makeover. "It's gratifying to work for somebody who doesn't measure accomplishment by the temporary state of public-opinion polls," Schmidt told The New York Times in November 2005. But privately, says a friend who declined to be quoted talking about personal conversations, Schmidt found the job maddening. The vice president ignored Schmidt's attempts to get him better treatment in the press. Schmidt, this friend says, was mystified that Cheney seemingly didn't care at all about his image.

When Maria Shriver, wife of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, asked Schmidt if he would run his 2006 reelection campaign, Schmidt accepted immediately. Arnold's image was badly in need of repair. His bullying, confrontational style had worn thin, and he was sinking in the polls. Schmidt forbade Schwarzenegger from driving his beloved Hummer in the middle of an energy crisis and told him to stop picking public fights with his political opponents just for the fun of it.