...Mr. McCain is called the White Tornado by some people who have worked for him over the years. Throughout his presidential campaign, he has been the overseer of a kingdom of dissenting camps, unclear lines of command and an unsettled atmosphere that keeps aides constantly on edge.
Even now, after a shake-up that aides said had brought an unusual degree of order to Mr. McCain’s disorderly world in the last month, two of his pollsters are at odds over parts of the campaign’s message, while past and current aides have been trading snippy exchanges debating the wisdom of attack advertisements he has aimed at Mr. Obama.
In an interview, Mr. McCain said he believed an organization consisting of sometimes colliding centers of power made sure that a candidate, or a president, reached fully informed decisions. “You’ve got to have competing opinions,” he said.
“I think a certain amount of tension is very healthy, and a certain amount of different views,” he said. “Because of the bubble that a president is in, and the bubble that a candidate is in, sometimes you find out afterwards something that — ‘Oh boy, I wish I had heard thus and such and so and so.’ So I appreciate and want some of the tension; I don’t want too much of it, obviously, because we have to have certain efficiencies. But I think there is a balance there.”
Mr. McCain hungers for information. He can regularly be seen reading newspapers from cover to cover, and aides say he embraces the briefing books given to him each night. His aides say he is especially studious when it comes to economic issues, an area in which he has admitted weakness. A former fighter pilot, Mr. McCain preaches the need to improvise under pressure, subscribing to the military maxim that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. The bursts of temper fellow senators have endured are rarely directed at his underlings. Indeed Mr. McCain has a history of being surrounded by people who are intensely loyal to him — and remain so even after being pushed off his ship.
But if Mr. McCain’s management style has kept him well informed and flexible, its drawbacks have been especially evident in the many often turbulent months since he began his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. It offers a contrast to the more rigidly controlled and nearly corporate management style that has marked the campaign of Mr. Obama, his Democratic counterpart. If anything, it recalls the freewheeling ways of the last Republican senator to win his party’s presidential nomination, Bob Dole in 1996.
