http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/us/politics/22drudge.html?pagewanted=all
The early advantage on their side, in the view of several Republicans, seems to have gone to Mitt Romney, who hired the former Bush political aide who had been the central party’s prime point of contact with Mr. Drudge, Matthew Rhoades. His status was solidified after the 2004 election at a steakhouse dinner in Miami with Mr. Drudge, who for all his renown in politics is a somewhat spectral presence who rarely agrees to meet with political operatives or journalists and who did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.
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Senior aides in the Bush war room, run by Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican communications aide, insisted on vetting any information to be fed to Mr. Drudge so as not to annoy and overwhelm him with items he might find unworthy. And, these officials said, when the approval was given, the main point of contact was usually the Bush aide who was closest to Mr. Drudge, J. Timothy Griffin, now a consultant to the campaign of Fred D. Thompson, the former Republican senator from Tennessee.
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Before Mr. Griffin left politics to work as a military lawyer in 2005, he had a dinner with Mr. Drudge and Mr. Rhoades to solidify Mr. Rhoades’s new place as the main Drudge Report contact for the central party. That dinner was first reported in the book “The Way to Win,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, published last year.
As the Bush political team dispersed among the Republican candidates this year, some of Mr. Rhoades’s former colleagues came to regret his special relationship with Mr. Drudge. Former aides to Mr. McCain said in interviews that they had cursed Mr. Rhoades’s name daily this year as Mr. Drudge ran a series of photographs making Mr. McCain look old and other items, like one wrongly raising the possibility that a bump he took to the head in Iraq was cancer.
Drudge has become as mainstream as any media ever was.
“People always ask, ‘So what does Matt Rhoades look like?’” said Kevin Madden, a friend and former Romney spokesman. “I always say, ‘When he wants to meet you, he will call you.’ He is Keyser Soze.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyser_S%C3%B6ze)
For Rhoades, this mystique is politically useful, and he’s not about to dispel it.
“Now that he has a job that he could get famous in,” said Steve Schmidt, his old partner in the Bush-Cheney war room, “it’s the furthest thing from his mind.”
On a recent afternoon, the Romney campaign refused to let a reporter into its three-story headquarters in Boston’s North End. Rhoades was also off-limits. Senior Romney advisers agreed to talk — albeit bloodlessly — about Rhoades in an empty Italian restaurant across the street.
Rhoades is a good manager, a loyal worker and a smart guy, they said. He speaks daily with Romney, gives instructions on how to best manage the stripped-down budget and exudes quiet self-confidence.
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“This is a very message-driven race,” said Beth Myers, Romney’s closest aide, who served as campaign manager in 2008 and hired Rhoades. “And that is right in his wheelhouse.’’
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Colleagues later credited Rhoades with significantly damaging Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) by characterizing him as a Francophile flip-flopper. (Rhoades apparently finds Romney’s own fluency in French less bothersome.)
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Griffin, who was leaving the RNC, invited Rhoades to a steak dinner in Miami with Drudge. At that dinner, Griffin passed the torch to Rhoades as Drudge’s chief connection in the GOP. Exactly how that relationship works is a mystery, but Rhoades’s own stock rose as a result and insiders considered it a coup when Romney hired him as communications director for his last campaign.
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Some reporters go out of their way to curry favor. “ENGAGED,” read an August posting in Politico’s Playbook announcing Rhoades’s engagement to Jamie Loftus, a McCain campaign veteran. It added that he “popped the question Saturday night on the beach in Siasconset, on Nantucket.”
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http://mittromneycentral.com/tag/jamie-loftus/
ENGAGED: Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign manager, to Jamie Loftus, chief of public and government affairs for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. Loftus, like Rhoades, is an alumnus of the DCI Group. She also worked on the McCain campaign.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCI_Group
Industry Public relations
Lobbying
Founded 1996
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jamie-loftus/7/a22/8bb