Russ Schriefer spent the first few weeks of 2000 driving around New Hampshire with a digital camera and a singular mission: finding a way to discredit John McCain with voters in the state's upcoming primary.
As a member of Texas Gov. George W. Bush's media team, Schriefer needed footage of his man on the attack against the senator from Arizona, his main competition for the Republican presidential nomination. When Bush declared at a factory in Pittsfield that McCain's economic plan would amount to a $40 billion tax increase -- based on a shaky assumption that McCain had flatly denied -- Schriefer had what he needed. Racing to a Manchester television station, he and a colleague reviewed the tape in the car and e-mailed a proposed script to campaign strategist Karl Rove.
A day later -- a virtual blink of the eye, given the lumbering process of making commercials at the time -- the "crash ad" was on the air.
"We kind of invented what is now the YouTube ad," Schriefer says.
The political landscape has since shifted, and with it the allegiance of campaign operatives who have their own set of mating rituals. The soft-spoken Schriefer now heads the media team for McCain, the man he helped Bush defeat seven years ago.
Schriefer and his longtime business partner, Stuart Stevens, were recruited by Mark McKinnon, the Texan who ran the media unit for both Bush presidential campaigns and is now an adviser to McCain. McKinnon told them he wanted "to get the band back together" and recruited another Bush veteran, Hollywood admaker Fred Davis. Other Bush alumni include campaign manager Terry Nelson, communications director Brian Jones, senior adviser Steve Schmidt and fundraising chief Tom Loeffler, a former congressman from Texas.
Schriefer jokes that their current candidate is new and improved. "We call him McCain 2.0," he says. "We've gotten some of the bugs out."
The updated model is employing an aggressive style more closely associated with the Bush operations of the past. McCain, who vowed to wage a positive campaign in 2000 -- until his contest with Bush dissolved into acrimony -- has in recent weeks taken hard shots at two other presidential contenders, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a fellow Republican, and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).
Schriefer dismisses the idea that the consultants are changing McCain's style. "No one has to nudge John McCain into straight talk," he says.
But the sharper edge and McCain's courtship of the party's conservative base have produced a marked change in tone from his freewheeling insurgency last time around. Schriefer, who will shape McCain's overall message as well as the ads, is a key figure in reconciling these apparent contradictions.
The arrival of Bush's former advisers has put an unofficial White House stamp of approval on McCain's effort, at a time when the Iraq war has rendered that a decidedly mixed blessing. Despite the animosity of their 2000 clash, McCain has emerged as the president's biggest backer on the season's two highest-profile issues: the war and the immigration compromise that all but collapsed in the Senate last week .
At the same time, the war's unpopularity and the president's depressed poll ratings mean that McCain, 70, has had to distance himself from Bush. McCain has repeatedly accused Bush of mismanaging the Iraq effort, even as he supports the current troop increase. He has complained about excessive federal spending, and he broke with the president in demanding limits on coercive interrogations of detainees.
Schriefer sees no problems in McCain's position.
"McCain has already talked about things he would have done differently than Bush, and he'll continue to do that," he says. "I think McCain absolutely can be a change agent. The guy's had a career of being independent, of reaching across party lines."
What about complaints that the onetime maverick has trimmed his sails to become an establishment candidate? "Some people wanted him to be the guy running against George Bush. When he's not, because Bush isn't in the race, they become disappointed, and that's okay," Schriefer says.
The secret to breaking through the Washington static, in his view, is to capture the courage that McCain displayed as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, as recounted in the memoir that Schriefer reread before joining the campaign.
"There's a certain sense that we need to tell the McCain story," Schriefer says. "It's using the story to compel the McCain vision of what he wants to do as president. The trick of the advertising is to bring those two halves together, the personal and the policy."
Still, Schriefer is quick to observe that he and the other Bush strategists, unlike such longtime confidants as John Weaver and Mark Salter, are not yet part of McCain's inner circle. "They've asked me to steer the train, make sure everyone is onboard and collect the tickets from time to time," he says. "But you can't expect us to walk in and be the go-to guys for McCain when you have people who've surrounded him for years."
Striking an emotional chord
Media consultants are critical players in presidential elections, since television advertising is the largest single expense and helps drive the campaign dialogue. Even in the Internet age, a barrage of 30-second bursts is the heaviest artillery available.
Schriefer's signature ads involve testimonials by family members or supporters that attempt to strike an emotional chord with viewers. When Tom Ridge ran for Pennsylvania governor in 1994, Schriefer put him in a leather bomber jacket on a frozen Lake Erie while his mother called, "Tom, put your hat on." The spot got people taking about the little-known congressman.
While Schriefer's firm has represented its share of Southern conservatives, it is most closely associated with Northeastern moderates such as Ridge and Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the former Maryland governor, whose loss last year is described by friends as heartbreaking for Schriefer. He had helped Ehrlich win election to Congress in 1994 with spots that featured the candidate's parents sitting on the porch.
"The first commercial he made in my first race, people still come up and talk to me about that," Ehrlich says. "Russ is terrific, a real pro. He's not a hothead. . . . He does not have a reputation of coming in as a black hat, running ugly and negative ads."
Schriefer has churned out plenty of attack ads, but he tends to avoid harsh music and special effects in favor of barbed humor and documented charges. "Negative ads motivate people to vote," he says. "If you go too far and you step over the line, you get called on it and it winds up hurting your campaign."
But Schriefer isn't averse to playing rough.
When the 2004 Bush campaign tapped him as manager of the Republican convention in New York, Schriefer pushed hard for speakers to attack Sen. John F. Kerry after a Democratic convention that was largely positive. That barbed approach "made some people nervous," recalls former party chairman Ed Gillespie. "But Russ said: 'We have to highlight the differences. We can't just talk about why President Bush's policies are good.' "
He was also determined to turn it into a better TV show. Schriefer put party operatives on the floor in the guise of "reporters" interviewing delegates, and he banned the practice of two or three people introducing star speakers such as Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"It takes all the sizzle out of it," he says. "It's like saying, 'Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you about the Rolling Stones -- great band, been around a long time.' "
Soon after the convention, Schriefer was on a conference call with other Bush strategists when someone mentioned having television footage of Kerry engaging in a favorite pastime: windsurfing.
"That's an ad," Schriefer declared, but he was greeted by puzzled silence.
"Everyone kind of scratched their heads and didn't quite get it," Stevens recalls.
Undeterred, Schriefer banged out a script in an hour and finished editing a commercial that night, showing Kerry, in a wet suit, heading right, left and back again as a narrator accused him of moving "whichever way the wind blows." In the campaign's final weeks, the mocking ad came to symbolize Bush's charge that Kerry was untrustworthy. Some Kerry staffers felt that their candidate had handed the president's team a gift.
"It very simply encapsulated what they had already driven into people's minds, that John Kerry was a flip-flopper who couldn't be trusted," says Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's former spokeswoman. "I'm more upset we gave them the opportunity than that they took it."
Schriefer quietly produced at least half of Bush's commercials in 2004, and the great majority consisted of attacks on Kerry. But while voters tend to decry such negativity, strategists remain wedded to the tactic for a simple reason: It works.
'It's not about him'
Schriefer, 49, has been hanging around Republican politics since attending Manhattan College in the Bronx. But unlike Stevens, McKinnon and many other political strategists, Schriefer keeps a low profile and almost never appears on television.
"He's not a big self-promoter," Gillespie says. "He's very old-school that way -- it's not about him."
Schriefer, the son of a Long Island butcher, got his start working for two Republican House members and was Mid-Atlantic political director for George H.W. Bush in the 1988 campaign. He became a lobbyist but soured on the profession after being asked to defend a product that harmed wildlife.
"I hated it," Schriefer says.
He managed Rudolph W. Giuliani's unsuccessful New York mayoral campaign in 1989, leaving after a management shake-up. The next year, while at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he decided to join forces with Stevens, who helped teach him the art of filmmaking. Stevens, a graduate of the UCLA film school, had written episodes for such television shows as "Northern Exposure" and was a producer on the HBO series "K Street." A wisecracking Mississippi native who enjoys the limelight, Stevens is as colorful as Schriefer is restrained.
In a campaign memoir, Stevens once vented about the Republican National Committee's refusing to run an ad attacking Al Gore for accepting tobacco industry donations because a focus group didn't like it: "Who was going to sit there with a group of strangers and yell: 'Yeah, I love that spot where you rip the guy's heart out and eat it on camera! Can we see that one again?' "
Schriefer and Stevens, like most consultants, do plenty of corporate work. Their clients have included the Air Transport Association, AT&T, the American Health Care Association, Tyson Foods, Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. During the 2004 Bush campaign, their firm was also mounting an inside-the-Beltway campaign for the National Association of Realtors, which the firm credits with helping to doubling the lobby's membership in the past three years.
Schriefer says the McCain campaign will pay his firm a "modest percentage" for buying advertising time but disputes the idea that this will encourage him to push for more ads. "It's more important for us to win than it is to make money," he says.
The first presidential campaign the two partners did together was Sen. Robert J. Dole's in 1996. Dole (R-Kan.), who lost the use of one arm after being wounded in World War II, was one of the few candidates to talk to Schriefer about his malformed right hand, which has no fingers. Schriefer, who rarely talks about his birth defect, says it has not inhibited him, even when using a video camera.
Dole dumped Schriefer and Stevens after losing the New Hampshire primary, amid complaints that his message was inconsistent. But four years later, the two took up position in "the bunker," as the Bush headquarters in Austin was called. Even as they did their best to defeat McCain, Schriefer says, they regarded his campaign longingly. "We'd look at the McCain campaign and say, 'Those look like the guys who are having all the fun,' " he recalls.
McKinnon says he and other Bush strategists were "itchy" to run attack ads against McCain, but felt they could not as long as he stuck to a public pledge to stay positive. But amid ugly charges in the pivotal South Carolina primary, McCain broke his vow with an ad charging that Bush "twists the truth like Clinton" -- enabling McKinnon, Stevens and Schriefer to unleash a wave of negative spots.
"If he hadn't run that ad," McKinnon says, "McCain might have won South Carolina."
Making the move to McCain
McKinnon was the first of the big-time Bushies to sign on with McCain last year. He agreed to assume a limited role if Schriefer would take the lead in making assignments and reviewing all scripts.
"He's a great combination of diplomacy and tough as nails," McKinnon says. "He's a good street fighter. You could easily be deceived by his easygoing demeanor."
The partners had feelers from other 2008 contenders before sitting down with McCain at his Senate office in January. They joked that they hoped he would have as much fun as in his 2000 bid for the White House, and McCain said he wanted to remain true to the spirit of that campaign. McCain also recalled his discussions with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the Iraq war commander, and said he would rather lose the campaign than modify his support for Bush's war effort.
For the moment, Schriefer and the media team are holding twice-weekly message meetings and are planning long-term strategy. In April, when McCain kicked off his campaign in New Hampshire, Schriefer was there, taping his events for later use.
Whereas Romney has spent millions of dollars on early television ads, Schriefer sees no need to be on the air for now. But his team has put several spots on McCain's Web site in which the candidate strongly backs the war and insists that Republicans "should be ashamed and embarrassed" over the rapid growth of government.
Former New Hampshire governor Stephen E. Merrill, a past client, says Schriefer will be a net plus for McCain because he knows the state so intimately. "While New Hampshire loved McCain last time because he was fresh and different and outspoken," Merrill says, "this time he's become the establishment candidate, and that's not a good thing for McCain. Russ will understand that and deal with it well."
