Rivalries Split McCain's Team

The campaign raised just $24 million in the first six months of the year and spent nearly all of it. Campaign officials reported last week that they had $2 million in cash still available, but GOP sources said that when debts are subtracted, the actual amount will be well under $1 million.

The largest early expenditures in the initial budget were for costs associated with fundraising -- almost $10 million through the first six months of the year. The campaign had contracted with fundraisers, paying them as much as $10,000 a month. One campaign source said the campaign actually lost money on some of those fundraisers, who produced less in contributions than they were paid to raise them. Their contracts have been renegotiated.

The cost of travel ate up more money. McCain travels by private charter, and because he is a stickler for rules, he pays the full cost of such jets. One Republican familiar with the campaign's spending said the cost of moving McCain from state to state amounted to between $250,000 and $300,000 a month.

Nelson loyalists, of whom by then there were many, blamed Davis and Eudy for devising a plan that was out of whack with reality.

One campaign source said Nelson, who came aboard as campaign manager after the initial budget was drawn up, sought to reduce the projected $154 million figure to a still-lavish $137 million. In early February, in the face of fundraising problems, the budget was reduced to $100 million for the primaries, and further reduced to $78 million in March as the disappointing first-quarter numbers were totaled.

Davis supporters blamed Nelson and Weaver for profligate spending and for mismanaging the day-to-day operations of the campaign. One high-level McCain official said Weaver and Nelson did not act aggressively enough. They made "minor cutbacks" and "figured this to be a fundraising problem, not a problem with the whole model he had for the campaign. They misunderstood the problem."

Nelson considered resigning in the spring, feeling he did not have the full authority to implement changes that he thought were required. Others say Davis complained to Cindy McCain that the team was not effectively managing the budget.

By mid-April, it was clear that something had to change. Nelson and Weaver urged McCain to remove Eudy as finance chief. Later that month, the senator did just that, replacing her with Mary Kate Johnson, a former Bush fundraiser and an ally of Nelson's.

At the same time, at Nelson's urging, McCain shifted Davis's duties to include traveling the country to meet with donors in an attempt to boost fundraising. As some in the campaign saw it, the move was an attempt by Nelson and Weaver to get Davis out of the way.

"He won Round One," said one Nelson supporter.

The Bush Model Fails

The political strategists who rode the Straight Talk Express bus with McCain in 2000 referred to their national headquarters in Alexandria as "the Pentagon," a nickname that reflected their disdain for bureaucracy, which they felt could destroy McCain's insurgent bid.

Eight years later, some of those same strategists created a behemoth of a bureaucracy to support McCain's second try at the White House. The top four -- Davis, Nelson, Weaver and Salter -- believed that a competitive campaign required all the tools of a modern operation, otherwise it would be at a disadvantage against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.