If you want to really irritate steve schmidt (and seeing that he's 6 feet, 225 pounds, and can show a flash of temper, it's notrecommended), just compare him to Karl Rove. The man in chargeof John McCain's day-to-day presidential campaign is tired of re-porters saying he's Rove's "protege"-the implication being that heis willing to do anything to win. For the record: the two men go back onlyto 2004, when Schmidt, then a 34-year-old consultant, was hired to runGeorge W. Bush's re-election war room. Schmidt learned then what it means to play rough when your candidate is behind. Now, four years later, he is back at it. McCain is down in the polls, and the candidate has struggled to get a consistent message across to voters. When that happened to Bush in 2000 and 2004, Rove unleashed meanerspeeches and uglier campaign ads. Under Schmidt's direction, McCain is doing the same.
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