Anger Management

When it comes to "volcanic" tempers--and we mean that literally--John McCain is apparently no match for Steve Schmidt, his new campaign guru. McCain yells. McCain curses. McCain occasionally gets in scuffles. But McCain, unlike Schmidt, does not (ahem) lose bodily fluids. According to a lengthy profile published in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, when Schmidt--nicknamed "Bullet" for his burly build and bald pate--gets really angry, his nose begins to bleed. (Schmidt denies the diagnosis.) "The nostrils would flare, he would get very red-faced... and you would just want to quit," a colleague from President Bush's 2004 war room told the paper. "You basically wanted to crash a chair over his head." Those who have worked with Schmidt before say that Team McCain "should steel itself," the Journal reports. Investing in Kleenex might be wise as well.

On the presidential campaign trail, temper tantrums are nothing new. The toxic cocktail of long hours, grueling travel, massive egos and constant public scrutiny is enough to send even the calmest operative over the edge on occasion. But McCain's recent decision to substitute the snappish Schmidt for campaign manager Rick Davis--the formal, even-keeled moneyman who engineered his miraculous primary-season comeback--raises an interesting question. What's the relationship between rage and electoral results--if any? Over the past three decades, an army of presidential Svengali's have made anger a defining feature of their professional personae, wielding it, like Schmidt, as a tool of management. Others, of course, haven't. A quick look at the history books reveals that the latter group may have been more successful in steering their bosses to victory.

Take John Weaver, for example. Weaver wasn't exactly placid. In fact, his outbursts were so frequent that staffers gave them a name: "W.O.W. moments," for Wrath of Weaver. He signature move? Throwing things. Pagers. A coffee table. A television. By New Hampshire, Weaver had sent at least two baseballs through office walls and smashed three Nokia cell phones. "I was actually hit by some of the shrapnel," Jim Merrill, McCain's South Carolina director, said at the time. As Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post, "Weaver uses his volatile temper to motivate his staff. If anybody is late for the morning meeting, he orders the next day's held half an hour earlier... Before a telephone tirade, he'll tell people around him to 'watch this.'" McCain, of course, lost the nomination.

Then there's Jimmy Carter. In 1976, Carter entrusted his electoral fortunes to a disheveled Southern operative named Hamilton Jordan, who devised the smart strategy of using the Iowa caucuses to lift the Georgia governor out of obscurity. He was known for "his extraordinary reticence." When truly angry, Jordan didn't lose his temper, but withdrew, physically or mentally. "No one who has covered a Southern courthouse could mistake the look on Jordan's face when he doesn't want to answer: chin uplifted slightly, eyes hooded," wrote the Washington Post. "It's not quite defensive, but it expresses an old Southern notion that power is best exercised quietly, and that only a fool talks about what he's going to do before he's done it." Four years later, however, pollster Pat Caddell--an Irish-American with a legendary temper--had a stronger hold on the reins. "Stories are told, over and over, by veterans of past campaigns: of screaming fights ending with a standard refrain of 'I'll ruin you!' or 'You're finished!,'" wrote the Post. "Of intimidating calls, doors slamming shut, phones slamming down. 'He scars you,' says one recipient of the

I don't mean to blame these losses on Caddell's shouting or Weaver's throwing--or Bill Clinton's red-faced meddlingin this year's primary contest, for that matter. Not at all. Elections are decided by the voters, not the gurus--and there have been too many exceptions (like, say, James "The Ragin' Cajun" Carville in 1992) to justify some sort of rule. That said, the tone at the top can affect (and/or infect) the larger operation--perhaps by breeding resentment, which breeds defiance, which breeds inefficiency--and in recent elections, it seems, a "cooler" management style has paid off more often than not. Lee Atwater and Karl Rove--who ran George H.W. Bush's and George W. Bush's successful presidential campaigns--were known as nasty partisan pugilists well-practiced in dirty trickery. But they rarely blew up behind the scenes. The consultant who piloted the DOA John Kerry to the 2004 Democratic nomination, Mary Beth Cahill, was described at the time as "no small talk, no face time, no sucking up to the candidate, none of those operative-style temper tantrums, no passive aggression, no waste"--even if the "Shrum Curse" ultimately prevailed. And Ronald Reagan's people weren't known for their pique.

Will history repeat itself in 2008? This year, Barack Obama appears to be the candidate poised to prosper from in-house equanimity. The senator himself brags that he has "the right temperament for the presidency"-- not "too high and not "too low"--while David Plouffe, his low-key, geeky campaign manager, and David Axelrod, his soft-spoken strategist, have run his bid like it was a "private corporation." "Mr. Obama’s circle of advisers takes seriously his “no drama” mandate," writes the New York Times. "It is a point of pride in his campaign that there have been virtually no serious leaks to the news media... about internal division or infighting." So far this approach has worked wonders for the nominee, who came from nowhere in the Democratic primaries to defeat the party's most powerful machine and now leads in November's polls. Going forward, Schmidt job is to prove that rage can get results. If he can't, blood won't be the only thing he stands to lose.