Big news. Read Ambinder and Publius for competing takes on what this means. And this from Ana Marie Cox seems particularly noteworthy:
Strategy-wise, Schmidt's been an advocate for some of the boldest moves made by the McCain campaign, including the coyly misrepresentative accusation that Romney was "for surrender" -- McCain's term -- based on wanting a "timetable" in Iraq. The charge twisted Romney's words, but many feel that it helped seal Florida -- and thus the nomination -- for McCain. He also hates the press, at least as an organism if not individually; McCain sitting around for hours in bad lighting, with everyone recording everything -- almost alone among the central advisers, Schmidt thinks the benefit is not worth the cost. If you're looking for someone to break up the party between the media and McCain, he's your guy.
Mark my words: if McCain pulls back from his all-out media embrace, the backlash will be enormous. Nothing infuriates the cool kids on the bus more than being reminded of how uncool they were in high school. Nothing.
UPDATE: Also, this:
Sources close to John McCain's campaign say that Steve Schmidt has been given the authority to "completely" overhaul the campaign's political department and is likely to abandon the regional campaign manager structure that Rick Davis set up.
As I've written numerous times, running 10 separate regional campaigns was utter insanity. Abandoning that idea will no doubt help McCain. Replacing it with a new anti-media strategy, however, will not.
Too bad... I was really going to enjoy watching the regional approach blow up. Oh well.
UPDATE II: Josh puts this in perspective:
That sounds a lot like they're scrapping the whole operation and starting again from square one, thus squandering the huge advantage they got by sealing up the nomination months in advance of the Democrats.No doubt, they're talk about retooling and logical evolutions. But this sounds much more like scrapping the whole org chart and starting from scratch.
I told you. McCain has no idea how to run a competitive campaign. None whatsoever. He just awful at this, and it shows.
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