Adviser's acumen kept McCain in race

WASHINGTON -- Charlie Black insists he was ready to hang it up.

After 36 years guiding maverick Republican campaigns, he figured he was getting too old for sleepless nights and constant travel.

But then Sen. John McCain called about a year ago, just as his campaign was blowing up. Could McCain's old friend return to the game?

He would.

At the helm of McCain's campaign is a man raised amid the drawls of North Carolina, schooled at the knee of Jesse Helms and so entrenched in the ways of Washington that he has enjoyed access to Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan.

"Charlie's one of the smartest political minds in the business," said U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, who has campaigned for McCain alongside Black for the past year.

Black is also a lobbyist.

Lobbyists have become a common backdrop for federal campaigns, thanks in part to Black.

"I think he shows us the worst side of how Washington works," said David Donnelly, director of Campaign Money Watch, part of a nonprofit group that tracks money and politics.

After switching between the worlds of politics and lobbying for decades, Black holds a nuclear-powered Rolodex and an unflappable demeanor. He knows how to soothe Republican egos and unearth their checkbooks to McCain's benefit.

"He's the prototype for the modern political operative," said Marc Rotterman, a Republican political consultant based in Raleigh who has worked with Black. "He's very much a player in what is, ultimately, a very small town."

He will use those skills to help McCain reach the White House.

It began last summer, when Black was working his lobbying job, helping clients such as AT&T, General Motors and the Occidental Petroleum Corp.

McCain's campaign had imploded, hemorrhaging money. McCain fired his top staff and called Black. The two have known each other since the 1970s.

Black took on a key role, volunteering for McCain while still lobbying on the side. He persuaded a handful of campaign folks to stay on.

"Look," he told them, "this is still winnable."

He helped make McCain, often seen as too moderate for the party's base, palatable enough to conservatives to win the GOP nomination.

"You'd have to say this was one of the greatest political comebacks of any we've seen in modern history," Rotterman said. "John McCain was political roadkill."

Sitting in his bare, windowless office at McCain's campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., on a recent morning, Black, 60, wouldn't talk about specific strategies he offered in McCain's resurgence.

But here's how Black works: He knows people. He returns calls within 24 hours. He remembers friends, stays loyal and comes through with favors. He doesn't rattle easily. He trolls the polls, counts up voting blocs on the political abacus in his mind -- then goes after those blocs relentlessly.

"I've proven to be pretty good at pulling strategies together and getting people to cooperate," he said.

Helping Helms, Reagan

Thin-framed and soft-spoken, Black has been around Washington since he helped Helms pull off his own coup in solidly Democratic North Carolina in 1972.

"The philosophy was what moved me -- limited government, strong national defense, stand up to communism," Black said.

From Helms' office, Black went on to work for Reagan and Republicans in every presidential election since.

He kept Reagan's hopes alive in 1976. But four years later, Reagan, upset at advice to pass over the Iowa caucuses, fired Black on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

"He was mortified by it," said Craig Shirley, author of "Reagan's Revolution" and a consultant who worked briefly for McCain this year. "Reagan was his hero."