The Silver Bullet

Schmidt is a leader in a new class of professional campaign managers, who run the equivalent of hundred-million-dollar corporations overseeing thousands of employees and volunteers. They are in it for the win, not for a White House job, and engage in take-no-prisoners warfare. He is called "the bullet" -- for his swift and accurate aim at the target, as well as for the shape of his shaved head.

Schmidt often projects a combative partisan demeanor, but his allies insist he is no ideologue. He has referred to himself as a "raging moderate." In fact, sources say, it bothers him to be called a protege of Rove's, whose name became synonymous with the contentious partisan politics of the Bush era.

Schmidt's sister, his only sibling, is gay, and he has made it clear that he is appalled by the party's hostile attitudes toward gay rights. He urged Schwarzenegger last year to sign the California gay marriage bill, which the governor vetoed.

Friends and colleagues say he never pulls his punches with candidates. He told Schwarzenegger during his reelection bid to lose the leather coat, stop driving his gas-guzzling Hummer around the state, spend more time in Sacramento and start acting like the governor. He bluntly told McCain in June he was going to lose the election unless he brought some discipline to his campaign.

Like his counterparts in the Obama campaign, Schmidt finds himself running a presidential campaign unlike any other in history. He is up against a 24-hour news cycle, relentless bloggers and a mainstream media obliged to feed Web sites constantly, and he has adapted to this new reality. He curtailed McCain's media availability because he found journalists were more interested in filing hour-to-hour for the Web, rather than reporting more in-depth looks at the day on the trail. "There has been a transformational change in the way Americans get their news," he says.

Nonetheless, Schmidt says he won't allow the campaign to get thrown off by momentary distractions and pundits shooting from the hip. To that end, he and his colleagues have developed what they jokingly call the "Dave Gergen theory of the campaign" -- a metaphor for all talking heads.

Gergen, a veteran of four presidential administrations, is a frequent pundit on cable news. If senior members of the campaign disagree on a strategic move, they watch what Gergen has to say. They then do the opposite.

Commander of the War Room

Schmidt grew up in middle-class North Plainfield, N.J., was an Eagle Scout, a tight end on the high school football team, and says he loved politics as far back as he can remember. The first presidential race he clearly recalls -- he was 10 -- was the Ronald Reagan-Jimmy Carter matchup. "You intuitively understood that there was something special about him," he says of Reagan.

He attended the University of Delaware but came three credits short of graduating because he couldn't pass a required math course. "I'd still be there," he says, noting that he has been diagnosed with a learning disability that makes higher math difficult for him.

Schmidt had a swift rise in politics, careening around the country to manage Republican congressional races in his 20s and coming up through the GOP staff ranks on Capitol Hill. He was catapulted to the top tier of operatives in 2004, when he landed the job of directing the Bush campaign's war room, monitoring the media and the opponent all day, every day. Then as now, he strove to define the opposition for the voters, and never let a news cycle to go by without a comment from his side.

Still, for someone who refuses ever to go off-message, Schmidt has forged good relationships with political reporters, and tries to address their needs while sticking with his plan. Reporters on John Kerry's plane in 2004 came to know him well, as he called them several times a day -- sometimes to offer a comment on the text of a speech he managed to obtain but that Kerry had not yet delivered. He is credited with pushing the campaign to relentlessly stick with branding Kerry as a flip-flopper on issues.

Those who work with him say he is a master of the details. Brian Jones, who grew up with Schmidt and has worked with him on campaigns, said that to prepare for debates, he would demand dry runs among the staff in the war room -- to anticipate what the opponent might say, and respond quickly. Staffers were assigned different floors at headquarters to simulate the varied venues they would work from on the night of a debate, and he would use a stopwatch to time how fast they could send an e-mail blitz to the media. His was a tight ship, and he was known to hang up on everyone during a conference call, to send a message if one staff member forgot to get on the call.