The most stirring compliment Michael Cooper dug up for this profile of the McCain campaign manager that took over from ousted Terry Nerlson is this: “Mr. Davis deserved credit for keeping the operation afloat.”
That is probably a lot harder than it sounds.
Indeed, McCain has collected a string of coups, from minor to middling, in the past month or so: Dan Balz wrote that McCain is who Rudy should watch out for, they’ve inched up in the polls, and just today, a FredHead officially jumped ship to join the Good Ship JSM.
Yet the campaign itself doesn’t seem to have much of an organized plan: they just dropped $100K in Iowa, where McCain will be lucky to come in fifth, and they’ve given a series of mixed signals about whether or not they’re going to take matching funds. With some guidance and strategy, McCain may be able to actually do something with the bit of momentum he has. If Davis wants to do more than keep McCain ’08 afloat, he’s going to have to start steering.