AP: The political ascent of Rick Davis has roots in Alabama
Hat tip to the radio station KTAR in Alabama, who found a detailed AP story on the political ascent of McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, and placed it on its web site due to its Alabama theme.
Here are some excerpts from the article, titled “McCain’s Campaign Manager Learned Politics in Alabama”:
MONTGOMERY, Ala. - The new campaign manager trying to salvage John McCain’s Republican presidential bid got his early education in politics in Alabama when it was an overwhelmingly Democratic state.
Now, three decades later, Rick Davis is known as a very capable campaign manager who’s devoted to McCain. But it would be difficult for anyone to remove “the smell of defeat” that is beginning to surround the campaign, said Winton Blount, a McCain supporter and former chairman of the Alabama Republican Party.
“It looks like to me in the South immigration reform has killed him,” the Montgomery businessman said.
Davis, a “Navy brat” who moved around the United States, has plenty of campaign experience going back to his student days at the University of Alabama.
He describes himself as a “total political junkie” while at Alabama from 1975-1979. And when he wasn’t studying politics, his interests were “sororities, beer and football.”…
Davis said he spent his last three years in Tuscaloosa as the state leader of College Republicans.
That post got him a seat on the State Republican Executive Committee in the days when its meetings were very small.
“It was 50 guys all over the age of 75,” Davis recalled…
The College Republicans post also got Davis involved in state campaigns, including serving as youth chairman for Republican Guy Hunt’s first campaign for governor in 1978…
Hunt lost that campaign, but won in 1986, becoming Alabama’s first GOP governor in more than 100 years and starting the movement of Alabama toward a two-party state.
For Davis, his involvement in College Republicans was a case of being in the right place at the right time. The still-emerging Republican Party in Alabama was willing to let a young, energetic college volunteer do almost anything.
“I benefited from that,” he said.
Davis left the University of Alabama one credit shy of graduation. He said he had changed his major from political science to operations research in the School of Business, which he hated, and he jumped at the chance to have a job in a campaign in Mississippi.
Politics has been his career ever since, working on the presidential campaigns and on the White House staffs of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, serving as deputy director of the 1996 Republican National Convention, and serving as deputy campaign manager for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign that year.
From his work in the Dole campaign, he became friends with Arizona Sen. John McCain and became manager of his 2000 campaign for president.
After operating a lobbying firm in Washington, Davis came back to be chief executive officer of the 2008 campaign. Davis said he didn’t want to be campaign manager this time because he wanted to stay away from day-to-day managerial duties and spend more time with the candidate and with fundraising.
But when McCain began to slide in the polls and his fundraising fell below expectations, the candidate decided to shake up his staff in mid-July amid reports of internal fingerpointing.
Campaign manager Terry Nelson, chief strategist John Weaver and communications director Brian Jones left, along with more than 50 campaign workers who resigned or were laid off. McCain’s ad experts - the same ones Alabama Gov. Bob Riley used last year - left, too.
From the upheaval, Davis emerged as McCain’s choice for campaign manager, even though some questioned whether Davis’ role as a lobbyist would damage McCain’s reformer image…
You can read the original, complete article by clicking here.
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