Rivalries Split McCain's Team

"When [McCain] went into the campaign, it was like everyone was going to use the techniques the Bush campaign used in 2004," said one Republican who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

By the middle of the second fundraising quarter, it was clear to those inside the campaign that a mistake had been made. Without an enormous amount of money to fuel the spending, McCain's Bush-like operation was becoming a liability, not an asset.

Money became an all-consuming concern for those at the top, especially for Nelson, who often played a sound clip on his computer from the movie "The Big Lebowski," in which a Jeff Bridges character named "The Dude" is asked "Where's the [expletive] money?"

The mood picked up after McCain's speech on Iraq at the Virginia Military Institute in April and his showing at the first Republican presidential debate on May 3. His five-state announcement tour in late April was deemed a success.

And then came the immigration debate. McCain's support for a comprehensive immigration overhaul put him out of step with the party base and, by the estimate of one McCain insider, cost the campaign $4 million or more in fundraising dollars.

As the campaign's fundraising continued to falter in June, leaks to reporters led to something of a witch hunt within the campaign. A staffer was instructed to create dummy budget numbers and send them to suspected leakers in hopes of flushing them out.

By early June, according to several sources, McCain was urging his strategists -- Weaver, Nelson and Salter -- to go public with another round of massive cuts to the campaign's staff and operations.

The three begged him to reconsider, saying the move would almost certainly dry up efforts to raise more money in June. McCain relented and headed to Iraq over the Fourth of July holiday, his third trip of the year.

But while he was there, the campaign was forced to announce that it had raised only about $11 million in the second quarter and had only $2 million left in the bank -- a far cry from the $45 million the budget had once assumed.

Back in Washington, McCain was, by all accounts, enraged. He railed at Weaver and Nelson in a meeting that ended when Weaver stormed out of the office.

Nelson, feeling as if he had lost the confidence of his candidate, offered his resignation, and McCain accepted. Weaver resigned, too, followed by a rash of lower-level staffers who owed their allegiance to him and Nelson.

"People I really believed in and a leadership team I really believed in no longer exists now," said Edward Failor, one of McCain's team in Iowa, as he resigned.

On Thursday, Davis, newly empowered, hired back many of the staffers whom Nelson and Weaver had fired in April, including former finance chief Eudy.

A McCain friend who talked to the senator after the departures of Nelson and Weaver described him as "pretty low." The friend said McCain told him, "I'm really unhappy because I've been telling these guys not to spend so much goddamn money, and they spent it anyway."

McCain described himself as "tossing and turning" over a "tough" decision and "sad" about what happened.

"He's trying to take control of his own campaign," the friend said.

Staff writers Anne E. Kornblut, Howard Kurtz and Matthew Mosk contributed to this report.