The Great Debates

To ease the mood before the first debate, McCain's advisers had shown the candidate a YouTube video of Joe Biden awkwardly encouraging a supporter at a rally to stand up—not realizing the man was in a wheelchair. McCain was amused by Biden's amiable talkiness. He was relieved to face him as the veep choice, and not Hillary Clinton, whom the McCain camp had truly feared. At the vice presidential debate on Oct. 2, McCain was delighted to see that Sarah Palin had irritated Biden. Watching the TV with some aides, McCain exclaimed, "He looks like an angry old senator!" The staffers were awkwardly silent, unsure if McCain appreciated the irony of his statement and hoping that he would experience a flash of self-recognition in time for his own performance in debate No. 2, just five days away.

He apparently did not. Haltingly pacing the stage, his limbs stiff from old wounds, McCain repeated the expression "my friends" until it was a meaningless punctuation mark. Obama stayed perched on his stool, watching, and not saying anything very memorable or that might in some way impede his steady march upward in the polls. McCain's aides later grumbled to a NEWSWEEK reporter that the town-hall format was a joke, that moderator Tom Brokaw asked too many questions and that the candidates couldn't really engage the voters with two-minute answers. But all of that may have been irrelevant. The same afternoon of the second debate, the Dow plunged 500 points. As the economy sank, the fortunes of Obama—as the Democratic candidate after eight years of Republican rule—inevitably rose. McCain could have performed flawlessly and still succumbed to economic reality.

After the town-hall debate, Salter and Schmidt reunited with a dozen or so members of the traveling press corps at a karaoke bar in Nashville. It had been months since the duo had had a night out with reporters. Salter, who had sung in a band in college, was cajoled into singing a few tunes. Before long, and after a drink or two, he was into it. Under pressure from the reporters, Schmidt joined him for a chorus of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues." Schmidt even sang "Rocky Mountain High," to squeals from the increasingly inebriated reporters. But then he went off and sat quietly. Schmidt looked worn out, his burly body weighed by stress and the woes of the campaign, his relentless stare dimmed by exhaustion. He ignored political questions and talked quietly about his family. Salter, on the other hand, had found his groove. Standing in the middle of the bar, dressed in his ubiquitous corduroy jacket, he bellowed "More Dylan!" until he had belted out every Bob Dylan song the bar had. Reporters sang loud, drunken backup and tried to get Salter to join them in boy-band dance moves. It was the first time anyone had seen Salter look as if he was having fun in a long time.

Salter had long deferred to Schmidt. McCain's speech and book-writing amanuensis was more than a decade and a half older than the campaign's chief strategist, but Schmidt was a take-charge type, while Salter preferred to play the observer and consigliere. The two men kept each other laughing with deadpan, self-deprecating humor. Salter joked about Schmidt's mathematical limitations, noting that his friend was so dyslexic he could barely read a poll. But as a storyteller, Salter admired Schmidt's ability to lay out a narrative, the storyline that every campaign needs to make its candidate more appealing (or less unappealing) to voters. Schmidt had been instrumental in launching the "No Surrender Tour" after the campaign staggered through the summer of 2007, and in July he had revived the flagging campaign again with the "celebrity" ad. Salter had fully come around to Schmidt's skeptical view of the press. Once, after Salter refused to let a couple of snarky bloggers aboard the Straight Talk Express, Schmidt called him with congratulations for staying firm. The two advisers had finally managed to persuade McCain to stop reading the political coverage of The New York Times after he had been irked by a couple of critical stories in late September.

Salter never criticized Schmidt, either to other reporters or within the campaign. He wanted to honor McCain's admonition against backbiting by his top advisers, and the two remained close friends. With a NEWSWEEK reporter, Schmidt rebuffed media gossip that he had grown apart from Salter. But he spent less time kicking back with him, in part because Schmidt was more often in headquarters than on the road. One evening at the bar, when Schmidt came over and a gaggle of reporters quickly turned their attention away from Salter (who was a familiar presence) and to Schmidt (who was not), Salter cracked that "Schmidt never joins a conversation. He commandeers it."

Though he denied it to NEWSWEEK, Salter seemed troubled by the campaign's relentlessly negative tone. The Obama campaign was not exactly running on sweetness and light—at least a third of Obama's ads attacked McCain. The Obama campaign did not hesitate to imply, through its choice of language, that McCain's "erratic" actions might have something to do with his advanced age. Obama's admen used the shameless old Democratic trick of trying to scare elderly voters by suggesting, based on little evidence, that McCain planned to cut their Social Security benefits in half. But by early October, virtually all of McCain's ads were negative. The press was increasingly painting him as a bitter old man. This seemed to pain Salter, who had worked so hard to craft a heroic, selfless image of John McCain—the idealization that McCain himself had wanted to live up to, but now seemed to be putting at risk by traveling the low road.

Salter was particularly aggrieved by a McCain ad suggesting that Obama wanted sex education taught to preschoolers. He predicted, correctly, that The New York Times would jump all over the ad and lambaste McCain. But no one on the senior team seemed to care what The New York Times wrote anymore. Schmidt wanted to kick the Gray Lady off the campaign plane for good. Though polling suggested that such a move would play well with the GOP base, Salter vehemently protested that it would be foolish to cut off the Times, and Schmidt backed off.

One of McCain's advisers said of Salter, "We call him McCain's wife." As one senior adviser explained it, "I've done a lot of campaigns … and the candidate's wife is always a bit of a problem. The candidate's wife, her job is different from everyone else's. Our job is for Candidate X to win. The candidate's wife's job is always to protect the candidate. Those two goals are often in conflict." A NEWSWEEK reporter asked the strategist if Salter was just reflecting McCain's preferences. "If that were a true husband and wife, how would you know?" the adviser answered. As for McCain's actual wife, "she has not been one bit of a problem. I'm a big Cindy fan."

In mid-October, one senior adviser noted to the NEWSWEEK reporter, "Of late there has been more separation between [Salter] and Steve [Schmidt] because, I think, he thinks we are taking McCain down a path that we shouldn't. And quite frankly, we are. It's the difference between scorched earth and having as little collateral damage as possible." ""

The Palin media rollout was a particularly destructive weapon. Vice presidential candidates often act as attackers, allowing their running mates to float above the fray. But Palin's exuberant assaults on Obama ended up dragging McCain into the middle of the fight, where he seemed decidedly uncomfortable.