Two of John McCain's top campaign advisors announced their resignation from the Arizona Senator's presidential campaign yesterday.

The resignations were the latest in a series of campaign changes, which reflect McCain's shrinking financial resources and the need for a shift in strategy, supporters and staffers said.

Terry Nelson, McCain's campaign manager and manager of the Bush/Cheney 2004 re-election campaign, and John Weaver, a longtime McCain adviser and the campaign's chief strategist, said yesterday that they would leave his staff. In a statement, McCain said that he accepted the resignations with "regret and deep gratitude for their dedication, hard work and friendship." A source familiar with the campaign said that several other top campaign aides also resigned after learning the news.

Nelson has been replaced by Rick Davis, who managed McCain's unsuccessful 2000 bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

McCain supporters and staffers said that the leadership changes reflected strategic shifts in how the campaign would manage resources but did not stem from disagreements about McCain's political message.

McCain entered the race earlier this year at the front of the nomination race, and backers said the campaign was designed with the expectation that he would lead polls and raise $100 million this year. The campaign hired 120 staffers and was building organization in states across the country before last week's quarterly financial report.

But lackluster party-wide fundraising and McCain's support of immigration reform unpopular in Republican circles hampered his ability to meet those fundraising goals, supporters said. Last week, Weaver and Nelson told reporters that the campaign had only raised $11.2 million in the last three months and had spent all but $2 million. The campaign cut dozens of jobs, closed regional offices and asked several top advisers to work for reduced or no pay.

"Originally, this campaign was designed with John McCain as the presumed front runner," said Steve Duprey, a vice chairman of McCain's New Hampshire leadership committee. "There was the presumption you needed a large Washington campaign, because you needed to run in 25 states."

The leaner McCain campaign will focus more on early voting primary states like New Hampshire, said Mike Dennehy, McCain's senior national adviser. McCain is scheduled to deliver a speech on the Iraq war in Concord on Friday and host a town hall event in Claremont on Saturday. Dennehy and others said that McCain would be stepping up his visits to the state.

"He's going to get back to basics, as it were, and that means town hall meetings and that means small neighborhood house parties," Dennehy said. "That means editorial boards, that means talk radio; that means Main Street campaigning."

Dave Carney, a Hancock GOP consultant who worked in the first Bush White House, said the shakeup was an appropriate but largely ceremonial response to McCain's recent fundraising numbers.

"You have to do something dramatic to give confidence to your donors and supporters that you have the ability to put the campaign in the place to win," he said. "I think there are a lot of people who will say this is changing the deck chairs on the Titanic, but I think they're wrong."

The resignations were announced by staffers just as McCain was speaking on the Senate floor about his recent trip to Iraq. McCain said he will continue to support the president's war strategy, an increase in troops designed to secure critical regions of the country.

Afterward, he told the Associated Press that he had not fired Nelson or Weaver and said he was not troubled by the turmoil in his campaign. (next page »)