McCain’s retreat: It’s packing up time in Michigan

Packing boxes waiting in the McCain Great Lakes Regional HQ.

A team of reporters from Michigan Messenger dropped by the McCain Great Lakes Regional Headquarters in Farmington Hills on Saturday seeking to verify news reports that the Republican presidential nominee was abandoning his campaign to win the state’s 17 electoral votes. They saw tight-lipped staffers in the process of packing boxes and loading them in vehicles.

The packing activity took place only a few hours before Michigan GOP Chair Saul Anuzis wrote on the Michigan Republican Party blog that “most McCain and Victory staff are being sent to other target states this weekend.” Anuzis also said in the blog that two field operatives will remain in Michigan working for McCain, while the McCain Michigan state director Al Ribeiro will be based in Wisconsin.

The Messenger team took photos of staffers amidst an array of packed and unpacked boxes in the McCain campaign headquarters, located in the offices of Trott and Trott, a law firm specializing in foreclosures. The firm is owned by David A. Trott, a McCain finance committee member, whose business empire has boomed as foreclosures have skyrocketed in Michigan in the last year.

Trott Center, former home of McCain Great Lakes Regional HQ

Staffers said that spokesperson Sarah Lenti was the only one authorized to speak to the media. However, Charles “Chuck” Wright, who identified himself as the director of the Victory Center, told Messenger’s Eartha Jane Melzer that the activity was “not typical” for a Saturday in the McCain office. (Victory Center is the title the Michigan GOP has given to its coordinated campaign operations for Republicans around the state. The McCain Great Lakes regional operation, housed in the same offices, covered Michigan, Indiana and Illinois.)

After the Messenger team identified themselves as media, a security guard told them the McCain campaign had banned all media representatives from the premises and asked them to leave the building.

McCain’s move was widely interpreted as a recognition of defeat in a key battleground state. “McCain waves ‘white flag of surrender,’” the Messenger said Friday. On Saturday, Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, a leading state Republican, told the Detroit Free Press, “If 20,000 people stay home in Michigan on Election Day because our commander has raised the white flag, that could change a lot of races.”

In his blog, Anuzis wrote at length about the impact of the McCain pull-out on the state’s Republicans.

VICTORY EFFORT…here is an update on where we are as of today. We have been working with the RNC to keep as many resources as we can here in Michigan. All 30 of our current Victory Centers will remain open. We are working with local county parties to staff and operate the majority of these Centers. We are securing additional funding locally to supplement these efforts where needed and get cell phones into area that are not set up with VOIP phones.

We are re-assigning staff to maximize our efforts for Chief Justice Cliff Taylor and in the Knollenberg and Walberg congressional districts first. The Democrats continue to see these seats as two of their top targets and with no air cover from the presidential campaign, we have make sure we increase our grassroots efforts to attempt to mitigate some of the negative impact.

GOTV [get out the vote], AV [absentee voter] and EDO [election day operations] efforts are being reorganized. We will have to prioritize our targets and figure out what kind of resources will be available for each.

This reorganization will certainly change the party’s on-the-ground activities in the state.

More boxes waiting shipment on moving day at McCain Great Lakes Regional HQ

(Eartha Jane Melzer and editorial director Jefferson Morley contributed to this story.)