I think we’ve now got the tell on the ouster of Rick Davis at the McCain campaign.
It’s not just that Davis is being replaced by Steve Schmidt as campaign manager. They are reportedly also scrapping their system of 11 largely autonomous regional managers to run the campaign, an approach to running a national campaign that I do not believe has ever been tried before.
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’ll talk about retooling and logical evolutions. But this sounds much more like scrapping the whole org chart and starting from scratch.
Late Update: The Trib discusses what appears to be another key part of this. The McCain hands getting their walking papers to make room for Rove’s crew to take over.
