The nucleus of Governor Schwarzenegger’s re-election team is coming together. Here are some of the folks that are already (or are about to be) onboard to run the day-to-day operations of the re-elect, as confirmed by a source on the Governor’s re-election campaign:
- As we have reported before, the Campaign Manager is Steve Schmidt. Schmidt comes back to California (where he worked on the Matt Fong campaign, among other efforts) straight from Washington, D.C., where he has been working closely with Vice President Dick Cheney. Most recently, Schmidt was the WH "jockey" in getting Justice Sam Alito through the Senate confirmation process.
- Also in major role with the campaign is strategist Matthew Dowd. Dowd has been a senior advisor to President Bush, and has a long list of bonafides.
- Working closely with Dowd, as his Deputy, will be Sarah Simmons. Simmons has been serving as a senior aide to none other than Bush top strategist (and Deputy WH Chief of Staff) Karl Rove.
- Katie Levinson will be the new Communications Director. Levinson has been working in both the White House and at the RNC working in their communications shops – Director of Television.
- Matt David who worked has worked closely with Schmidt, and handled the communications efforts on the Alito confirmation, will be onboard as the new Deputy Communications Director.
- Finally, at least for this post, is a mention of Matt McDonald, the high-energy "rapid response" communications guy at the White House will be coming out West in a similar role for the Schwarzengger Campaign. His will be a shorter-term stay before he heads off to business school.
These folks will join others, like Marty Wilson (who coordinates fundraising) already in place.
It is clear from a first pass at the talent coming into Sacramento from Washington, D.C. that Schmidt and Dowd have been given a lot of lattitute to assemble a winning team. We’ll be working to do some profiles on these folks in the coming weeks, but I wanted to share this information with you right away!
February 10th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I realize that I left out Susan Kennedy when I was talking about people already working for the campaign. I realized that after reading the latest revelations about Kennedy in today’s LA Times (see the link on the FR main page).
Perhaps this is a good time to pass a notepad around the Gov’s office, and have everyone just jot down their sources of outside income going backwards to a year before hiring on. Then they can take the list and post it on the front door of the office.
I suspect that the $ that Kennedy took was not illegal or enethical – but it just looks bad that the LA Times, and not Kennedy or the Governor’s office, is the one breaking the news.