Politico.com

Winning Isn’t Everything

2015-10-29

<img src="http://static2.politico.com/dims4/default/77717cc/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F45%2F1b%2Fe0fa3aa247478e4077bf53a32f01%2Fcampaignbadgenew.png" style="float:left; padding-right:25px" />It was the beginning of 2015, and John Weaver was getting antsy. At least a dozen, maybe as many as 20, Republicans were planning to run for president; hundreds of millions of dollars were already in the process of being raised—and spent—to return the GOP to the White House. The 2016 presidential race had become a full employment act for Republican strategists. Everyone was in the game and cashing in. Everyone, that is, except John Weaver.Weaver is among America’s most celebrated political consultants, an elite operative who knows how to orchestrate a big presidential campaign—most famously Senator John McCain’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/11/us/2000-campaign-quest-birth-death-straight-talk-express-gamble-gamble.html">Straight Talk Express</a> in 2000. In fact, Weaver has had a hand in every presidential race since 1988, when, as a twentysomething, he helped ensure that George H.W. Bush won their mutual state of Texas. Even in 2004—when Weaver’s longtime rival Karl Rove <a href="http://observer.com/2004/03/kerry-brings-mccain-aide-to-campaign/">kept him out</a> of George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, essentially exiling Weaver from the GOP—he managed a way into the fray, briefly crossing party lines and advising Democratic candidate John Kerry. But as the 2016 campaign began, Weaver, now 56, found himself on the outside looking in at the biggest Republican field of his lifetime—excluded by fellow consultants seemingly envious of his genius or candidates too dumb to recognize it. To sit out this cycle would be an enormous blow to his ego, not to mention his bottom line. Weaver began searching hard for a candidate who would give him a way in. Several drew his attention. One was a former client, Rick Snyder, according to people close to the Michigan governor, who was considering a presidential bid, and Weaver wooed him for several months before Snyder decided in May not to run. Weaver also privately talked to a political adviser to Donald Trump. In late February, the Washington Post had published a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-he-is-serious-about-2016-bid-is-hiring-staff-and-delaying-tv-gig/2015/02/25/4e9d3804-bd07-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html">story</a> in which the mogul declared he was “more serious” than ever about running for president. It might be hard to remember now, after Trump’s summer spike to the top of the polls, but in early 2015 his potential candidacy was considered an out-and-out joke. Most savvy Republican operatives rolled their eyes at his declaration; just three years earlier, Weaver’s client, short-lived Republican primary candidate Jon Huntsman, had <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2011/12/huntsman-i-wont-kiss-trumps-ring-069791">blasted</a> the eventual nominee, Mitt Romney, for even meeting with Trump. But this time was different. According to one member of Trump’s team, Weaver reached out to him to congratulate him on the Post story and to encourage Trump to run, beginning what he and another person close to Trump saw as Weaver’s backstage courtship.Weaver offered what the Trump adviser called Weaver’s “quote-unquote free consultation”—detailing how to spend money in New Hampshire, explaining why Michigan would be an especially important state this cycle and generally trying to impress. In early May, Trump’s team began talking to the veteran Republican ad man Fred Davis, a frequent Weaver collaborator, about working for the mogul. Davis not only eagerly pitched his services—gushing in one memo to Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski that making ads for Trump would be an “[a]lmost life-defining” project for him; according to the two people close to Trump, Davis pitched Weaver’s services, too. “He’s the perfect guy to reset the Trump brand,” one recalls Davis saying of Weaver. According to the Trump adviser, Davis wanted “astronomical” fees for consulting services, including a $160,000 signing bonus, a $20,000-a-month retainer and access to first-class travel. Davis says the conversations fizzled after it became clear that Trump was neither “a great fit strategically nor economically.” What role, if any, Weaver might play was left ambiguous; Weaver now says that he was never explicitly pitching the campaign, and Davis says he never pitched Weaver to the campaign. But the Trump adviser who talked to them left with a very different impression. “They made a mistake that others have made about Trump,” adds the other person close to Trump. “Just because Trump is wealthy doesn’t mean he spends his money. He’s one of the most fiscally conservative, some would say cheap, people on the planet.”<blockquote>One such candidate describes the experience as the most painful of her career: “Am I sorry I ever took his call? Yes.”</blockquote> Weaver, meanwhile, was still romancing another White House hopeful: Ohio Governor John Kasich. In April, Weaver <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2011/12/huntsman-i-wont-kiss-trumps-ring-069791">told the Atlantic</a> that Kasich, who was then still contemplating a White House bid, “would absolutely be a threat for the nomination.” He followed up on this bit of public flattery by privately reaching out to the governor, whom Weaver had never met before, to offer his services. He “beat their door down,” he later <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/14/is-john-kasich-the-gop-media-darling-who-could-finally-win.html">explained to CNBC</a>. But it was hardly a sure thing. “I’ve met with Kasich, and I don’t think it’ll go anywhere,” the Trump adviser recalls Weaver saying. Fortunately for Weaver and Davis, it actually did: In June, after deciding to pursue a White House run, the Ohio governor tapped Davis to work for his super PAC, which would handle the bulk of the pro-Kasich advertising. Weaver was a closer call. The strategist had touted his deep knowledge of New Hampshire, developed during McCain’s victorious 2000 primary campaign there, as something that would be particularly valuable to Kasich, who was planning to strike a more moderate, even maverick-y, tone than the rest of the Republican contenders. But, according to multiple people familiar with the Kasich campaign’s internal deliberations, after Kasich’s team started talking to Weaver, it was still reaching out to other Republican consultants before ultimately tapping Weaver. “John Kasich is a proven winner, at the ballot box and in tackling the tough problems facing America,” Weaver said in a statement when the news of his hiring broke. “I will work my guts out to help.” Whatever his interest in Trump had been, it was quickly forgotten. Later in the summer, Weaver was tweaking the blustery billionaire on Twitter. “Imagine a NASCAR driver mentally preparing for a race knowing one of the drivers will be drunk,” <a href="https://twitter.com/jwgop/status/625810551243825152?lang=en">Weaver tweeted</a>. “That’s what prepping for this debate is like.” In the multibillion-dollar business that is political consulting, there’s no shame in chatting up three potential clients at the same time, nor in publicly trashing a guy whose praises you sang privately. A job is a job. In seeking out the confidence, and the business, of potential candidates, the best political operatives are chameleons by necessity—part strategist, part business manager, part image maker, part therapist—and they must not only invest their own considerable ambition in the drive and ideals and popularity of someone else; they must convince that person that they are invested. In the singularly strange world of political campaigns, John Weaver is among the best at this task.He is also among the most controversial. Part of the controversy is ideological. Weaver has been a vocal critic of some of the GOP’s more conservative elements—he memorably called the GOP “the angry-white-man party” amid the 2013 government shutdown—and, in recent years, he has worked for a number of candidates who don’t toe the typical Republican line. In fact, some of his clients haven’t even been Republicans. But it’s Weaver the sharp-elbowed businessman who really draws the ire of a wide array of Republican consultants and politicians, more than two dozen of whom I spoke with for this article. Over the course of his three decades in politics, Weaver has collected millions of dollars working for dozens of campaigns, and a number of those who have hired him told me they believe he did them wrong. Indeed, Weaver’s résumé in recent years includes many disgruntled losers as well as elected officials. “The beach is littered with bones of the people that this guy has abused,” says a rival top-tier Republican consultant. One of those people, Elizabeth Ames Jones—a former Texas railroad commissioner who tapped Weaver to run her 2012 campaign for the U.S. Senate—says the experience was the most painful of her political career: “Am I sorry I ever took his call? Yes.”All of which is why, when Kasich finally brought Weaver in from the cold, some of his fellow consultants, and some of the Ohio governor’s fellow politicians, were aghast. “Did Kasich and his team not have access to Google out in Columbus?” asks Scott Reed, a former executive director of the Republican National Committee who’s now the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s senior political strategist and has clashed with Weaver over the years. But in the secretive fraternity of political consultants, it can take much more than a Google search to discover the history of even one of its most prominent members.*** The Weaver charm is undeniable. I encountered it myself one day last year when I sat down with him in the bar of a Tex-Mex restaurant near his home outside of Austin, Texas. A lanky and dour man, Weaver usually likes—even loves—to talk to journalists. “He’s not the consultant who says the press is our enemy,” says Matt David, a fellow consultant who worked with Weaver on the McCain and Huntsman campaigns and is now working for Kasich’s super PAC.Indeed, sitting across from me and picking at a blackened salmon salad, Weaver seemed ready to seduce—quick with old yarns from a 35-year career in politics that certainly doesn’t lack for color. He told of how in 1978, as a sophomore journalism major at Texas A&M University with dreams of becoming a sportswriter, he was assigned to write a profile of a conservative Democratic economics professor there who was running for Congress. The professor liked Weaver’s piece and offered him a campaign job in exchange for $200 a month and free rent in the apartment above his garage.That professor turned out to be <a href="https://www.aei.org/scholar/phil-gramm/">Phil Gramm</a>, soon to become famous as a party-switching Republican congressman and senator, and the campaign turned out to be Weaver’s accidental start in the political consulting business. His work for Gramm, which would span three decades, eventually brought him into contact with an array of Republican luminaries, from Roger Ailes—the media consultant on Gramm’s 1984 Senate run—to a young Karl Rove. Weaver’s most important encounter, however, was during Gramm’s ill-fated 1996 presidential campaign, which introduced him to John McCain—the Arizona senator who was a member of Gramm’s kitchen cabinet and for whom Weaver would later famously <a href="http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/leave-it-to-weaver/">sketch on a cocktail napkin</a> a path to the White House in the 2000 race. The campaign that Weaver built for McCain in that election—a freewheeling, insurgent bid featuring the Straight Talk Express bus on which the senator conducted a seemingly <a href="http://longform.org/posts/the-weasel-twelve-monkeys-and-the-shrub">never-ending news conference</a>—became one of the most celebrated partnerships in modern politics. For Weaver, who grew up in a Democratic family in West Texas and was never particularly ideological, McCain’s maverick ways were an attraction, and Weaver worked hard to turn McCain’s blunt independence into a powerful political tool. Weaver recalls: “I told him, ‘You’re going to be vulnerable. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to screw up, and the act of screwing up and being seen screwing up and then fixing it actually will build a safety net for you, not only with the voters but with the people in the media who share information with the voters.’” That McCain was trying to beat the establishment front-runner, George W. Bush—advised by Weaver’s old Texas rival Rove—only made it more personal. “It was one of those kind of campaigns that turned into a crusade,” Weaver says.When Bush ultimately bested McCain, Weaver was crushed, and he has complained since that Karl Rove tried to blackball him after the election by allegedly telling Republican candidates that if they hired Weaver, they would find themselves on the wrong side of the White House. Indeed, for a time Weaver had to cross party lines to work for John Kerry and other Democrats to stay afloat. Then, in 2002, he was diagnosed with cancer. “Get divorced, quit your job, switch parties, and get leukemia in one year,” he lamented to a reporter at the time, “this is not a recipe for success.” Through it all, Weaver maintained his tight, almost filial relationship with McCain, and after Bush was reelected in 2004, Weaver began laying the groundwork for a McCain 2008 presidential bid. But he soon found himself in a power struggle with another McCain loyalist, Rick Davis. According to Weaver, the conflict was over money. Weaver believed, as he subsequently told reporters, that Davis was using the campaign to feather his own nest through more than $2 million in contracts that went to an Internet services firm co-owned by Davis and a property management company that was represented by Davis’ friend Scott Reed. (Davis denied any wrongdoing at the time.) The infighting intensified, and in the spring of 2007, McCain began contemplating replacing Weaver’s handpicked campaign manager, Terry Nelson, with Davis, who had been lobbying for the job. Weaver and another longtime aide told McCain that if he got rid of Nelson, he would be getting rid of them, too. “We thought … he’d never cross that line,” Weaver says. “We fooled ourselves.” In July, McCain fired Nelson, and Weaver cleaned out his office at McCain’s campaign headquarters.If the 2000 loss to Bush was painful for Weaver, this was far worse. He went into what friends describe as a slump. Although he insists that his faith in McCain remained unbroken, others close to the senator had their doubts—especially after Weaver was quoted in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/politics/21mccain.html?pagewanted=all">New York Times story</a> that insinuated McCain was having an affair with a younger female lobbyist. (Weaver has adamantly denied that he was a source for it.) Even worse than those suspicions, though, was Weaver’s feeling of impotence. He could only watch from the sidelines as his 11-year project to put McCain in the White House ended in defeat.“The one major regret I have is that I didn’t stay,” Weaver told me. “I don’t have a big enough ego to think we would have won the race against [Barack] Obama, but the contours of the race would have been different.” He ticks off the McCain campaign’s mistakes after he left—none more so than its selection of inexperienced running mate Sarah Palin—as if they were yesterday. “We still would have lost,” he said, “but John’s image would have been different, and he would feel better about the campaign.”McCain, who declined to comment for this article, is said not to hold a grudge against Weaver, but he’s no longer close to his old consultant either. (“McCain’s a rapid-fire caller, and he’ll call five people in a row,” says one person close to him. “He doesn’t call Weaver.”) Weaver claims to have let bygones be bygones, as well. “I love him,” he says of McCain. “I love him today, I loved him then.” But some people close to Weaver believe the McCain experience may have made it impossible for Weaver ever to feel that way about another politician again. “He considered McCain kind of a father figure,” says one Weaver friend. “I think that’s impacted his ability to have a deep level of trust, since that moment happened, with a candidate.”***In the small club of high-profile, top-dollar consultants to which Weaver belongs, political operatives can make more than $1 million a year, working anywhere from two to two dozen campaigns in an election cycle. They’re heirs to an occupation that, with its roots in advertising and public relations, has always been about salesmanship, about the wizardry of those who can turn the philanderer into a pillar of “family values,” or the dilettante scion of a wealthy family into an entrepreneurial “job creator.” This sort of talent, of course, is valuable in seducing more than voters. There are plenty of methods consultants employ to separate candidates from their money—and the money involved has grown enormously over the past couple of decades. According to the <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/bigspenders.php?cycle=2014&display=A&sort=O&Memb=S">Center for Responsive Politics</a>, winning Senate candidates in 2014 spent an average of $10.6 million on their campaigns; the high cost of running for office is one reason that, for the first time, a majority of members of Congress are now millionaires. Most consultants running those races receive monthly retainers—anywhere from $7,500 for a congressional race to $25,000 or more for a major statewide or presidential campaign. Beyond that, they often take cuts of various services the campaign spends money on. The biggest of these typically come from television advertising, where, per industry standard, the campaign pays a commission—usually ranging from 7 to 15 percent—to the consultant whenever it purchases air time. For those getting a cut, a natural incentive is to spend more of the campaign’s money on television ads. For decades, candidates have complained about this practice, but for the handful of consultants at the top of the industry, those complaints have had little impact. “Politicians really believe that the advice they’re being given by this person is so invaluable that they don’t even want to talk about the money,” says Leslie Kerman, a Democratic campaign finance lawyer. “Without [the consultant’s] assistance, they’re nothing.”One reason consultants are able to get away with this is that, oftentimes, the candidates don’t know much about the campaign business. “Say you’ve got a … first-time candidate,” says a Republican political consultant. “How does he know who the good firms are or what he should be charged? He’s completely at the consultant’s mercy. It’s like watching one of those gazelles die in Africa and then the bones are picked clean in 10 minutes.” It doesn’t help that, while the Federal Election Commission stipulates that campaigns report every contribution they take in above $200, the FEC is more laissez faire about accounting for the expenditures—requiring only vague descriptions of what the expense is for and not asking campaigns to disclose subcontractors—so it can be difficult to see who’s ultimately being paid what. Arguably, this culture is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/us/politics/25consult.html?pagewanted=all">starting to change</a>, according to both Democratic and Republican consultants, who say that in recent years candidates have sought fewer Svengalis and more MBAs. George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns were ruthlessly efficient. His 2004 reelection bid operated under the direction of Ken Mehlman, who insisted on rigorous accounting and required consultants to give up their side gigs; contracts were vigorously vetted, and commissions were capped. “Mehlman had a ‘burn your ship’ philosophy. It wasn’t a place where consultants could come in and just have the run of the place,” says Republican strategist Kevin Madden, who worked in the Bush 2004 press shop. “In a ham and egg sandwich, the hog’s committed but the chicken only makes a contribution. Mehlman believed that it was better to have a whole bunch of hogs and no chickens.” <blockquote>The other way is, you charge them money, probably less than some of your competitors, and then you come up with nontransparent ways that you can make money on top of that.”</blockquote>Barack Obama had a similar philosophy. In the 2008 election, he capped how much his consultants, including his chief political and media adviser, David Axelrod, could receive in fees and commission from the television advertising spending. According to Richard Wolffe’s book The Message, when Axelrod tried to change his deal in the 2012 race, hiring a lawyer to negotiate a new contract, Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, held the line, saying that Obama had told him: “I want everybody treated fairly, but I don’t want anybody to get rich on this. They’re gonna get rich on the books they write afterwards.”In fact, consultants can still get plenty rich without writing books. “When you’re a general consultant or the top media guy for a big-time gubernatorial or Senate race, much less a presidential race, you’re going to make a couple million,” says one Republican political consultant who speaks from personal experience. The issue now among the consultant class is more a matter of how to make that money. Do you play by the new rules? Or do you find candidates and campaigns where the old rules can be applied—which, oftentimes, means no rules at all? “You approach a potential client in one of two ways,” says the same consultant. “One is total and complete transparency: ‘This is how much money I’m going to charge you. It’s a lot. You make a determination of the value, but this is what it’s going to cost.’ The other way is, you charge them money, probably less than some of your competitors, and then you come up with nontransparent ways that you can make money on top of that.”The consultant adds, “The first way is the way a CEO of a Fortune 500 company makes his money. The second way is the way a Wild West cowboy makes his. It’s new school versus old school.” John Weaver, the consultant says, “is more old school.” *** After the John McCain heartbreak, Weaver wanted a way back into the business, redemption. In 2007, he started his own political consulting company. It had the impressive if vague name the Network Companies. In reality, the firm was mainly just Weaver; his second wife, Angela Hession, a former Rudy Giuliani aide; and Steve Goldberg, a New York political consultant and phone-banking expert. But with Weaver’s McCain-acquired reputation as a consultant who can help outsider candidates, that was more than enough for a handful of politicians who hoped he could work some magic for them.One was Rick Snyder, a mild-mannered venture capitalist from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who, despite having never run for public office, wanted to be governor. When Weaver signed on as Snyder’s chief political strategist in 2009, Snyder was such a political nonentity that he did not register at all—not even at 1 percent—in some polls. But in Weaver’s deft hands, Snyder’s vulnerabilities—namely his lack of experience and charisma—were transformed into strengths. Contrasting himself with the three “career politicians” he was running against, Snyder eschewed suits and ties and campaigned in a French blue dress shirt, projecting the air of a new economy executive. He dubbed his economic plan “Michigan 3.0” and detailed it on the stump in a PowerPoint presentation. And then there were Snyder’s TV ads—$2.4 million worth of them during the GOP primary, financed largely by his personal fortune—which branded the man with the accountant’s mien as <a href="http://media.mlive.com/elections_impact/photo/9697869-large.jpg">“One Tough Nerd.”</a>“Nerds get results,” Snyder said in one ad that aired to great fanfare during the 2010 Super Bowl. “Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett. Shoot, Clark Kent saved thousands of lives.”“I can’t think of many general consultants who’d let me do that kind of ad,” says Fred Davis, the ad man who came up with the “One Tough Nerd” spots. “But that’s what makes John a genius.”On August 3, 2010, the night of the GOP primary, Weaver waited for the results in Snyder’s suite at the Marriott Hotel in Ypsilanti. When it became clear that Snyder had won, it was Weaver who personally delivered the good news to the candidate and his family. And when Snyder went down to the hotel ballroom to deliver a victory speech to his cheering supporters, he recited the words that Weaver had helped pen for him. “We’ve got a new definition for a nerd now, don’t we?” he crowed. As Weaver looked on, his comeback seemed complete. Not only had he taken Snyder from zero in the polls to the GOP nomination; he was now on the verge of having a client in a crucial swing state’s governor’s mansion.Sure enough, on November 2, 2010, Snyder was elected the 48th governor of Michigan. But Weaver was not the one to give Snyder the good news. That August, less than a week after the primary triumph, Weaver, according to multiple sources, had been dropped as Snyder’s strategist. The move was handled in such a quiet fashion that it has not been made public until now, more than five years later. One Snyder campaign aide likened it to a scene from The Godfather. “It was the settling of all family business,” the aide told me. Another Snyder campaign aide recalls that on the day of Weaver’s exit, “They made sure there was nobody in the campaign office. They divided everyone up and told them, ‘This is what is happening.’” According to multiple people familiar with the matter, aides to Snyder had discovered evidence of what they considered to be irregular spending in the campaign’s media buying and phonebanking operations. When these allegations were brought to Snyder, these sources say, advisers talked him into handling the matter quietly. “If you’re running for governor as the nerd accountant,” says one Michigan Republican with knowledge of the episode, “it’s not really what you want to see on the front page of the Detroit Free Press.” Privately, Snyder tried to downplay the financial nature of the dispute, telling one person that he dumped Weaver because the consultant “did not have the same personal values” as the candidate.Weaver acknowledges the parting of ways, but he maintains that he was not fired and insists there was never a conflict over money between him and the Snyder campaign. “It’s categorical bullshit,” he told me. According to Weaver, he and Snyder, who declined to comment for this article, had always planned for him to leave the campaign after the primary and to shift his contract over to the Michigan GOP, so that he could advise Snyder on general election strategy while having the state party pick up his tab. (A source familiar with Weaver’s state party contract disagreed, telling me: “At the Snyder campaign’s request, John had absolutely no involvement with any work on the gubernatorial race.”)None of this stopped Weaver from continuing to tout himself as a Snyder adviser—both to potential clients and to reporters. “He and I talk, we trade emails,” Weaver told me when we met last year, describing their relationship as “very good.” But a few days after my conversation with Weaver, when I asked Snyder aide Kyle Robertson whether Weaver continued to advise the Michigan governor, who was then in the midst of his reelection campaign, Robertson replied in an email: “John Weaver’s contract with Rick Snyder for Michigan ended on September 23rd, 2010. He has not had any affiliation with Governor Snyder or his campaign since his contract ended.”And yet, in a testament either to Weaver’s political talent or to Snyder’s capacity for forgiveness—or, perhaps, both—none of this stopped Snyder from thinking of Weaver earlier this year when the Michigan governor was considering a run for the White House. “We were looking at what it would take to run,” says one current Snyder adviser, “and John had obviously worked with Snyder before and had obviously worked on presidentials before, so we talked to him. Should the governor have decided to run, I think John would have been part of the team.”***Less than two months after his falling out with Snyder in 2010, Weaver was in a dispute with another high-profile outsider candidate whose gubernatorial hopes he had once nurtured: maverick Democrat Tim Cahill. Only this time, the conflict would not end quietly. At the time, Cahill was state treasurer of Massachusetts, and had decided to launch an independent bid for Bay State governor. His running mate, former Republican state Representative Paul Loscocco, had recommended Weaver and another GOP consultant named John Yob, both of whom Loscocco knew from working on McCain’s 2008 campaign. After Cahill hired Weaver and Yob as his strategists, they, in turn, tapped one of their associates, Adam Meldrum, to manage Cahill’s campaign. But as Cahill struggled to gain ground on the Democratic incumbent Deval Patrick and the Republican challenger Charlie Baker, he says he grew dissatisfied with Weaver. Cahill claimed to be reluctant to fire his consultant for fear of bad press, but by September, he had stopped taking Weaver’s advice and was resigned to paying him to do nothing for the rest of the race.What Cahill didn’t know is that Weaver had plans of his own. As later revealed in a series of emails recovered from a campaign server that were included in a court filing, Weaver in mid-September began plotting to dump Cahill. He also sought to engineer the departure of Meldrum and, most crucially, Loscocco. As Weaver saw it, the Cahill campaign was headed for certain defeat but still had the potential to spoil Baker’s chances; what’s more, Weaver surely knew, if Loscocco stepped down as Cahill’s running mate, he might be able to tip the race to Baker, becoming a Republican folk hero. “That’s who we were loyal to,” Weaver told me of Loscocco. “We wanted to protect him in the process.” Of course, delivering Loscocco to the GOP would also be good for Weaver.On September 23, according to Cahill, Weaver left the candidate a voice mail informing him that he was quitting. By the time Cahill arrived at his campaign office a few hours later to break the news to his staff, Cahill says, the Associated Press had already interviewed Weaver and the story had hit the Internet. (Weaver maintains he told Cahill directly at least a day before the story broke.) On September 24, Meldrum quit the campaign as well. A week later, Loscocco withdrew as Cahill’s running mate and endorsed Baker. Weaver had evidently meant for the moves to be a coup de grâce for Cahill, but they backfired, with Loscocco’s endorsement of Baker instead generating public sympathy for Cahill. That’s when Weaver changed his tactics. Hardball was about to be played.When a politician hires a political consultant, he typically entrusts the consultant with his darkest secrets. And, in Cahill’s case, Weaver and his allies possessed what seemed to be an especially dark one. During his time on the Cahill campaign, Meldrum had become aware of discussions via email and text message between other Cahill advisers about TV ads promoting the Massachusetts Lottery, which Cahill administered. These state-funded ads, Meldrum believed, were intended to help Cahill’s gubernatorial bid.On October 3, two days after Loscocco endorsed Baker, one of Loscocco’s advisers emailed Weaver and Meldrum: “[T]he Baker folks would really appreciate any ‘hard evidence’ emails/documents that shows improprieties…Adam [Meldrum] and I just spoke and he has some stuff. I think we should give them everything we have.” An hour later, Weaver replied, “yes....we don’t want this to drag out...but one definitive piece to end this martyr business.”It was about this time that a Cahill aide discovered these and other emails on the campaign’s server, which, apparently unbeknownst to Meldrum, was still being used to route messages to Meldrum’s personal account.An aide still loyal to Cahill emailed Meldrum, “If you use information you gained while in Tim’s employ against him now I’ll personally finance the law suit [sic]. Feel free to pass this to the scumbags you’re unfortunately aligned with.” Meldrum forwarded the note to Weaver, who responded: “Fuck him.”With seemingly nothing left to lose, on October 7, Cahill filed suit against Weaver—as well as Meldrum, Yob and another ex-adviser—accusing his former consultants of trying to sabotage his candidacy. The suit alleged that Weaver and his associates gave the Cahill campaign’s “trade secrets and confidential and propriety information” to Baker. Meldrum, with public support from Weaver, responded that Cahill was trying to prevent them from blowing the whistle on his improprieties, and in a court filing, their lawyer <a href="http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20101014/NEWS21/10140341">released the damaging emails</a> and text messages about the lottery campaign in a sworn statement from Meldrum. A few weeks later—after Cahill had finished a distant third to Patrick and Baker—the four consultants settled the suit with Cahill, reportedly agreeing to pay their former client’s legal fees of $45,000, which was a fraction of the $215,000 Cahill had <a href="http://www.necn.com/news/politics/_NECN__Read_It_Yourself__The_Cahill_Complaint_NECN-247476711.html">collectively paid them</a>. But that was not the end of the story: Massachusetts’ Democratic attorney general, Martha Coakley, took note of the evidence Weaver and his associates had made public and launched an investigation of Cahill and the lottery ads. In 2012, the former state treasurer was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/us/timothy-cahill-indicted-in-massachusetts-election-ad-case.html">indicted</a> on charges of public corruption, fraud and conspiracy. At the news conference announcing the indictment, text messages Meldrum had turned over were <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/04/02/timothy-cahill-indicted-charges-using-official-funds-for-campaign-boosting-ads/IXnrphqI9gDOMR8DTMPcQK/story.html">blown up to poster size</a> and displayed on an easel. Cahill’s case ended in a mistrial, and he eventually settled by paying a $100,000 fine.Weaver, for his part, washed his hands of the whole affair when I asked him about it. “I answered some reporters’ questions about it,” he said of the lottery ads, refusing to get into any specifics. But Cahill, who’s now the president of a financial management firm, is not so forgiving. “Once you light the match, you don’t know what you’re going to burn,” he told me. “John almost took my life away from me, not just my political career but my life.”***By late 2010, Weaver was focused on the prospect of true redemption: the chance to run another presidential campaign. After the 2008 elections, when Weaver was still struggling to recover from the depressing McCain experience, he and then-Utah Governor Jon Huntsman had started discussing a possible 2012 presidential bid. A moderate Republican and son of a billionaire who had <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/voice-vote-meet-jon-huntsman/story?id=14563408">just been reelected</a> with 78 percent of the vote, Huntsman was Weaver’s new dream candidate. The consultant soon began the process of setting up a PAC to finance the exploration of a White House run and arranged trips to Michigan and South Carolina for Huntsman. The 2012 plans, however, were seemingly scotched when Obama tapped Huntsman to serve as his ambassador to China. But in late 2010, while he was still in Beijing, Huntsman got word to Weaver that he would, in fact, consider running. It was a bizarre situation: For reasons of legality and protocol, Huntsman couldn’t be seen as laying the groundwork for a campaign to defeat the man he was representing overseas. But it was also, in some ways, a political consultant’s dream: helming a presidential campaign without the meddlesome distraction of the candidate himself. Weaver began <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/WaitingforHuntsman/2011/03/26/id/390807/">creating a campaign in absentia</a> and, after establishing the PAC he had almost started two years earlier, embarked on hiring an army of consultants and operatives. Since Huntsman was still not a candidate, and wasn’t even in the United States, Weaver was essentially accountable to no one but himself. That period would prove to be the high-water mark of the Huntsman campaign. Once the candidate came back from China in May 2011, things began to go south. Part of the problem was the candidate, who in the flesh didn’t resemble the dynamo Weaver had been telling everyone about. He was moody and indecisive and, despite having given his tacit approval to Weaver and his team, sometimes didn’t seem like his heart was really in a presidential run. An even bigger problem was money—or lack thereof. Weaver had assumed that the Huntsman family’s deep pockets and connections would finance a massive operation, and he had spent like it—renting out a huge campaign office in Orlando; hiring top political talent in early primary states (“taking chess pieces off the board,” he called it, according to a Huntsman adviser); and paying that talent quite generously—including himself. In less than six months, Huntsman’s Horizon PAC paid the Network Companies nearly $437,000. Weaver told me that much of that money went to subcontractors, but according to a source involved in the PAC, Weaver didn’t always specify who the subcontractors were or present receipts for their work. “It was all very secretive,” says one former Huntsman campaign aide. (Robert Kelner, Weaver’s attorney, says, “It’s very common for campaign consultants not to itemize all subcontractors.”)There were also financial questions about contractors who were identified. Bahm Marketing, a firm owned by Steve Goldberg—who started the Network Companies with Weaver before leaving the partnership in 2008—was listed in Utah campaign finance filings as having received more than $200,000 in payments from Horizon PAC. But after Huntsman dropped out, Goldberg <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/more-than-200000-apparently-missing-from-huntsma#.hqXBbGGy">told BuzzFeed</a> that Bahm had received only $20,000 from the PAC. Weaver told BuzzFeed Goldberg was “mistaken.” Horizon PAC later amended its report to stipulate that the $200,000, in fact, went to Weaver’s Network Companies.Then there were Weaver’s expenses. Former Huntsman aides mention the day in May when Weaver missed multiple commercial flights from D.C. to New Hampshire, so he had the campaign charter a private plane for him for $4,800. (Weaver says he sought and received Huntsman’s approval before chartering the flight.) They also talk about the evening in June, right around the time of Huntsman’s official campaign announcement, when Weaver expensed to the campaign a senior staff dinner at David Burke Townhouse Restaurant in New York that came to more than $1,000.<blockquote>It’s clear that Weaver is very smart and thinks through any situation that could happen so that in the end he has every base covered,” says one Huntsman insider.</blockquote> These expenses were all on top of the $131,749 in fees Weaver’s Network Companies was ultimately paid by the campaign. “John lived large off that campaign,” says one of the former aides.According to several people who spoke with the candidate, Huntsman, who declined to be interviewed for this story, grew uncomfortable with Weaver’s strategy and especially his spending after only a few months of campaigning. But, according to these people, the presidential hopeful was hesitant to confront his consultant, lest Weaver turn on Huntsman and sabotage the campaign through the media. At the beginning of Huntsman’s run, Weaver’s excellent media contacts—nurtured over decades and cemented during the rollicking, reporter-friendly McCain campaign in 2000—had worked to Huntsman’s advantage. Weaver was perceived as being especially close to the 2012 campaign’s two biggest alpha dogs, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the journalists who had written Game Change, the seminal autopsy of the 2008 race, and were busy reporting their sequel. Heilemann had written a glowing profile of Huntsman for New York magazine; Halperin had appeared on Morning Joe and <a href="http://www.mrc.org/bias-alerts/tingle-watch-msnbc-gang-goes-gaga-over-gop-candidate-jon-huntsman">gushed</a> that Huntsman and his wife, Mary Kaye, were “as impressive as any couple I’ve seen.” But by the summer, when the Huntsman campaign began to struggle, Weaver’s great relationships with reporters started to seem more sinister to Huntsman. “We knew Weaver and his close circle saved up everything along the way and were going to use it against the governor,” one Huntsman insider told me. “We’d say it during the campaign, whenever there was something noteworthy: ‘That’s going to the book.’” Sure enough, when Halperin and Heilemann’s Double Down came out in 2013, the chapters on Huntsman were brutal, portraying him as the soft-handed son of a billionaire who didn’t want to work hard and was in over his head. Especially damning were emails the authors had obtained between Huntsman’s wife and Weaver—emails that appear to belie the Huntsmans’ contention that the decision to run for the White House hadn’t been made until after Huntsman was finished serving as ambassador. When I asked about Double Down, Weaver insisted he didn’t leak the emails, or trash Huntsman to the authors. If anything, Weaver seemed to suggest that Huntsman’s treatment in the book was payback by Halperin and Heilemann over their own embarrassment at having initially fallen so hard for a candidate who turned out to be a dud. (Halperin and Heilemann declined to comment.)But people close to Huntsman believe the payback was all Weaver’s. “It’s clear that Weaver is very smart and thinks through any situation that could happen so that in the end he has every base covered,” says one Huntsman insider.***Not all of the bad endings between Weaver and his clients wind up in the pages of best-selling books or in dense legal filings. Some of Weaver’s most acrimonious and revealing breakups have involved campaigns of much smaller stakes and politicians of much smaller stature—in other words, just the sorts of people who are especially susceptible to a consultant of Weaver’s particular talents and renown. Like Elizabeth Ames Jones, the Texas Railroad Commission member who was gearing up to run for the U.S. Senate in 2012, when her term on the commission ended. In the fall of 2010, Weaver’s then-brother-in-law, a Republican activist and lawyer in a prominent San Antonio law firm, suggested she meet with the consultant. Over a November lunch in Austin, Weaver pitched his skills, effectively lobbying her to hire him as the chief strategist for her Senate campaign. He said he would even be willing to work for her at a discounted rate since he wouldn’t have to leave Austin. At a follow-up meeting over coffee, Weaver regaled her with stories of his success on the just completed Snyder campaign. Jones agreed to his “discounted” monthly retainer of $12,000 to be paid for the first three months—December, January and February—up-front with a check for $36,000.Like Elizabeth Ames Jones, the Texas Railroad Commission member who was gearing up to run for the U.S. Senate in 2012, when her term on the commission ended. In the fall of 2010, Weaver’s then-brother-in-law, a Republican activist and lawyer in a prominent San Antonio law firm, suggested she meet with the consultant. Over a November lunch in Austin, Weaver pitched his skills, effectively lobbying her to hire him as the chief strategist for her Senate campaign. He said he would even be willing to work for her at a discounted rate since he wouldn’t have to leave Austin. At a follow-up meeting over coffee, Weaver regaled her with stories of his success on the just completed Snyder campaign. Jones agreed to his “discounted” monthly retainer of $12,000 to be paid for the first three months—December, January and February—up-front with a check for $36,000.On the January morning on which Jones was embarking on a statewide speaking tour, orchestrated by Weaver and his campaign advance person, she and a small team were preparing to drive to her first event in Dallas when she received an urgent call on her cellphone. It was Weaver, who told her he was sorry, but that he couldn’t work on her campaign after all because it might interfere with some lobbying efforts he was about to undertake in Austin. “I was absolutely floored,” recalls Jones. “He was quitting before we even got started, and he had committed a lot of money for the tour and other supposedly great ideas.” Those ideas included an ambitious statewide phone bank operation which, after Weaver’s abrupt departure, was quickly halted by the campaign because of concerns it had developed about the calls. Upon her return from the speaking tour, Jones confronted Weaver and demanded a refund of his retainer. Weaver agreed to pay back half and did send the campaign $7,000, but he never refunded any additional money. Weaver also said any refund for the phone work not completed would have to come from Steve Goldberg, the vendor he had contracted to conduct it. Goldberg refused to refund the campaign any money for the calls not made, instead offering the candidate a $100,000 credit on future calls. Jones, who ended up getting out of the Senate campaign for personal reasons, is succinct in summing up her whirlwind experience with Weaver: “In hindsight, I couldn’t trust anything he said.”Then there’s Abel Maldonado, the one-time lieutenant governor of California and former state senator who was considering running for governor in 2014. In February 2013, Weaver met with Maldonado at the Beverly Hilton. Over glasses of pinot noir from Maldonado’s personal vineyard, Weaver told his prospective client that, despite having recently been bested in a congressional campaign, Maldonado had what it took to become governor, and that he could help him achieve that goal. Weaver’s pitch was mesmerizing, a grand vision of a multilingual campaign that would reach voters in English, Spanish and even Mandarin. He promised to tap his vast network of donors and experienced political operatives, and he pledged to turn Maldonado into a national figure, touting his excellent relationships with reporters at publications like Time and the New York Times and suggesting that he would get Republican leaders like McCain and Snyder to stump for him. “He definitely got Abel excited,” recalls Brandon Gesicki, a California political consultant who had worked on Maldonado’s failed bid for lieutenant governor three years before that and who was at the table for the Hilton pitch session. “Listening to what he was saying, what he was promising to do, I was like, ‘OK, if he can deliver on half this, this is worth pursuing.’ He’s very seductive.” Three weeks later, Maldonado, who declined to comment for this story, agreed to put Weaver in charge of building his campaign team. “You’ve got to understand that Abel had never run at the level that John plays at,” says Gesicki. “Abel had run statewide for lieutenant governor, but that’s a few-million-dollar campaign. For a gubernatorial campaign, you’re looking at a $40 million effort—and John was telling Abel he could do it.” But almost as soon as Maldonado’s long-shot California gubernatorial effort came together, it started to spin apart. According to people close to Maldonado, Weaver had promised to write what he called “the plan”—a document that would flesh out, in great detail, the fantastic vision he had previewed in Beverly Hills. It would serve as Maldonado’s playbook and road map to Sacramento. Although Weaver said he would have it ready by May, there was work that could be done in the meantime. On April 15, 2013, just days after Maldonado had received his first significant campaign donations, Weaver sent the campaign treasurer an invoice for $50,000 with instructions to wire the money to his bank account. Fifteen days later, Weaver sent another invoice for $25,000—demanding payment in advance for his services in May. What the campaign didn’t know at the time was why Weaver might have been so insistent about payment. Maldonado’s team later learned that Weaver had borrowed $125,000 from Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, for whom he had done some political consulting in the early 1990s. It was one of a number of loans that Weaver has secured over the years from friends and associates, according to multiple sources—including some who say Weaver has yet to repay them in full. Pickens, however, is apparently the only person who has sued Weaver over unpaid loans. That March, around the same time Weaver went to work for the deep-pocketed California businessman with dreams of becoming governor, Weaver settled the suit and agreed to repay Pickens, which he did later that year.Weaver’s invoices weren’t the only ones that Maldonado began receiving. Weaver’s old friend Fred Davis was initially making $15,000 a month as Maldonado’s media consultant (Davis later reduced his monthly fee to $10,000). And Weaver had tapped a young operative named Jeff Corless to serve as a high-priced campaign manager.But when Maldonado received a bill for $17,500 for Corless’ service, the candidate balked—complaining to Weaver that it had been his understanding that Corless would be making $14,000 a month. “El Jefe,” Weaver wrote in reply to Maldonado in an email. “We talked about 14k and then I talked with Jeff again and he pressed some very valid points about his business and asked for 17….given we have free housing in LA, his 24/7 work ethic, and having a happy LEAN fucking staff who are all committed like trojans....it is fair. And you are not working for overhead, my friend. We have no overhead really.....this is lean and will stay lean.” Maldonado settled on paying Corless $15,000 a month.By the end of April, after paying the growing team of consultants that Weaver had assembled, Maldonado had only about $2,000 in his campaign treasury. Undeterred, Weaver’s team had scheduled Maldonado’s first commercial shoot with Davis, for April 30, agreeing to pay him $80,000. When Maldonado told his team to scrap the commercial until he had raised more money, Davis hit the campaign with a $8,693 cancellation fee. At the same time, Maldonado was demanding, with increasing urgency, more for his money. After Weaver failed to provide “the plan” in May, he told Maldonado that he would have it June 2, and he scheduled a campaign meeting in Santa Barbara, where he would personally present it to the candidate. But on May 31, a day after being wired his $25,000 advance retainer for June, Weaver sent Maldonado and the rest of the campaign team an email saying that he was going “off the grid” for a family weekend in Texas. He signed off, “See you on the back side.”When Weaver resurfaced a few days later, Maldonado asked to see the draft of the plan, but Weaver insisted that he needed to present it in person and scheduled another meeting for June 25. The day before that meeting, Weaver sent word that he had come down with pneumonia and couldn’t travel. Maldonado beseeched Weaver, in phone messages and emails, just to send the plan. He did not hear back. When Weaver sent his invoice for the advance of his July salary, Maldonado refused to pay it. On July 9, in an angry phone call, the two agreed to part ways. In a little more than three months, Maldonado’s campaign had spent more than $200,000 on campaign consultants—$112,000 of which had gone to Weaver. A few months later, <a href="http://www.mrc.org/bias-alerts/tingle-watch-msnbc-gang-goes-gaga-over-gop-candidate-jon-huntsman">he dropped out</a> of the race altogether. <blockquote> People can say any goddamn thing they want to, OK? And they do,” Weaver says. “And you have to be wise enough to figure out if it’s sincere belief, or is there another game being played?”</blockquote>Weaver maintains that Maldonado’s problems were of the candidate’s—not the consultant’s—making, as did the other consultants he enlisted on the campaign. “I gave him multiple plans, we had conference calls … out the ass, and at the end of the day he’s a great-hail-farewell-pat-you-on-the-back kind of guy, but he just didn’t have the fire in his belly. He didn’t want to work at it,” Weaver told me. He wasn’t the only one with bad feelings. “He’s a political vampire,” Gesicki says. “Once he got his clutches locked in, he started making move after move that made his grip even stronger, to the point he sucked all the blood out of the campaign that he could.”***“People say a lot of things,” Weaver told me during one of our conversations. “It’s the joy and agony of our business. People can say any goddamn thing they want to, OK? And they do. And sometimes they say it out of sincere belief … and sometimes people say it because they have an ulterior motive—and you have to be wise enough to figure out if it’s sincere belief, or is there another game being played?”This was Weaver’s response to my questions about the fallout from these contentious campaigns over the past few years, the recriminations and the name-calling—and worse—that happens all too often when a campaign is over and it hasn’t gone the way the candidate, or the consultant, had hoped. “When you lose, it’s never the candidate’s fault,” he dryly noted. But Weaver just as easily could have been talking about the other side of the business—the things people in his position say at the beginning of the race, when they’re trying to persuade a candidate to bring them on board. Do they do so out of sincere belief? Or is there another game being played?In recent years, there are new pitches being made, ones that conjure not the “narratives” Weaver touts, but the modern MBA’s world of microtargeting and metrics and the other trendy attributes of a digital-era campaign. Any good consultant, including Weaver, can speak that vernacular. But at its most basic level, politics remains an enduringly human occupation—and candidates are still susceptible to that very human failing of hearing what they want to hear. It’s old school, but it works. And John Weaver, old school consultant, is very much still in the game. As John Kasich’s chief strategist for 2016, Weaver is stealing a page from his old McCain and Huntsman playbooks and running his familiar New Hampshire-or-bust campaign. While the Ohio governor is lagging in national polls, his numbers in the Granite State <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/nh/new_hampshire_republican_presidential_primary-3350.html">are respectable</a>. What’s more, his political operation there, fortified by many of Weaver’s contacts from the McCain days, is considered to be among the best in the Republican field. And Kasich has clearly benefited from Weaver’s national media contacts, a number of whom have applied to the Ohio governor the same glowing terms they once reserved for McCain and Huntsman. Weaver, however, does not appear to enjoy the same free rein and influence he had in his past presidential efforts. Kasich communications director Chris Schrimpf says, “John Weaver is our chief strategist and is guiding all our efforts,” and the campaign has already paid him $85,000, according to FEC filings. But Kasich’s operation—unlike Huntsman’s, which relied on Weaver to make almost all of its key hires—is stocked with longtime aides who are unquestionably loyal to, and protective of, the governor. According to people familiar with the campaign’s internal operations, these aides, not Weaver, hold the campaign’s purse strings. “The people that have the financial control in that campaign,” says one Kasich insider, “are Kasich’s old Ohio people.” Meanwhile, some of Weaver’s longtime compatriots, including Davis, are working on behalf of Kasich—but for the candidate’s super PAC, which means they are prohibited by FEC regulations from communicating with Weaver. Goldberg, Weaver’s longtime direct-marketing associate, told me that he’s not working for Kasich at all.Will it all be enough to help Kasich avoid the buyer’s remorse that seems to plague some of Weaver’s other old clients? Some are doubtful. “I wish Governor Kasich better luck with our mutual acquaintance,” scoffs Elizabeth Ames Jones. But hope springs eternal. “John Kasich shopped John Weaver in a lot of places … and he went in with his eyes open,” says one person close to the governor. “Kasich has put Weaver in a box.” Which, all things considered, is presumably fine with Weaver. After all, when it comes to presidential campaigns, even being in a box is better than being on the outside looking in.