They are the successors on the right to James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, who pioneered the so-called war room during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.
But Republicans took the concept to a whole new level in 2004 when they managed to raise questions about then-Democratic nominee John Kerry’s greatest perceived strength - his record as a Vietnam war hero - and ultimately helped undermine his candidacy.
Thirty-seven-year-old Steve Schmidt was the brains behind the Bush-Cheney rapid response team, and since early July, has been directing Republican John McCain’s campaign.
No surprise that since he took charge, the Arizona senator’s campaign has grown harder-edged and more combative, relentlessly attacking Barack Obama’s perceived assets, including his popularity and promise to be a change agent.
Now, the man nicknamed ‘the Bullet’ by Karl Rove is seeking to replicate what he did in Boston in 2004 with a war room in Denver. Two dozen GOP operatives under the direction of protégé Danny Diaz have set up shop about a mile from the Pepsi Center, barricading themselves in behind a gate monitored by security guards.
They are broadcasting via live video stream on their new website, notready08.com, and plan to beam the images of heavyhitter surrogates - Romney on Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani on Wednesday and Tim Pawlenty on Thursday - to television stations around the county.
They will also be poring over speeches, records and other tidbits of the convention, and then blast emailed criticisms to reporters.
Yet for all his war-room creds, many who know Schmidt, a former tight end from North Plainfield, N.J., say he is not a Karl Rove wannabe. For one thing, he hates Washington. After directing the Bush-Cheney rapid response team in 2004, Schmidt went to work for Dick Cheney, and among other things, shepherded the nominations of Samuel Alito and John Roberts through Congress.
But after being introduced to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger by his wife, Maria Shriver, in 2005, he moved his family to California to work on Schwarzenegger’s 2006 re-election campaign, successfully re-branding the candidate as a moderate who cared about environmental issues and getting things done.
(Among other things, he told Schwarzenegger to lose the leather coat, stop driving his gas-guzzling Hummer around the state, spend more time in Sacramento and start acting like the governor.)
Friends and colleagues say Schmidt’s personal style is anything but kamikaze, and he likes to refer to himself as a “raging moderate.”
His only sibling is gay, and he has talked about how he resents the GOP’s hostile attitudes toward gay rights. He urged Schwarzenegger last year to sign the California gay marriage bill, which the governor vetoed.
Schmidt was importuned by several of the Republican aspirants for president earlier this year. (Mitt Romney sent him an antique chair to symbolize a seat at the table.) As a longtime admirer of McCain, he agreed initially to advise him from afar.
A Washington Post profile by Lois Romano described his reluctance to get more fully involved:
At 37, Schmidt is one of the most forceful, successful and unconventional political operatives of his generation, running one of the most uphill GOP presidential efforts in decades — yet he is hardly known outside political circles.
With a 6-foot frame carrying 225 pounds, plus a shaved head and an intense, clipped New Jersey style of speech, it’s a little hard for him to stay under the radar. But try he has. He rarely appears on TV and avoids talking about strategy publicly. He would not be photographed for this story.
In fact, this was not at all how he planned to spend his fall.
. . .Schmidt was drawn to McCain, but planned on a limited role so he could have a life and remain in California, where he had settled after running Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2006 gubernatorial reelection campaign.
By all accounts, Schmidt shook up McCain’s campaign just as he had Schwarzenegger’s. He centralized authority and imposed extreme message discipline on a candidate who until that time had preferred to chat freely with members of the media about a whole gamut of issues.
He has also brought in an army of ambitious, young colleagues like Diaz whom he trained to function with military precision on earlier campaigns and who reportedly adore him.
And they went to work on recasting Obama as a celebrity candidate who was not ready to lead the country. Whether their attacks will succeed, especially now that the Obama campaign has decided to respond quickly and in kind, remains an open question.
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