Understated, authoritative... sure, all senior campaign guys obsess about how to get goats in lingerie into bedrooms and launch paranoid, obscenity-laced rants about vaguely unflattering magazine covers of their boy...
He even appears to have a valid point about the cameras not being allowed into the rooms where the big mistakes were made... "John, the public just *loves* war heroes! And at the convention, we're gonna play that to the hilt!"
Considering the convention performance and the result, that was certainly an eerily prescient choice of words!