He complains to Sasha Issenberg:

But when they start to worry, you can’t put them on the phone with the candidate to assuage or motivate them, right?

Yeah, well I can’t say, “Hold for Jeb.” Sometimes we’ll do a briefing and then we all leave the room and he can go talk a little bit about what’s going on in the campaign, but that’s all. There are a lot of lawyers around to make sure it’s all done properly. We’re so lawyered up I feel like a Clinton….

How is the experience of setting up a super-PAC, just getting it off the ground, different than it would be if it were a candidate campaign?

I’ve set up a lot of campaigns and it’s not that dissimilar. The nice thing about a super-PAC is you can specialize on what you can do—because what you can’t do is some of the things that are completely candidate-specific. So we’re really a messaging organization, messaging and research here. We care a lot about digital messaging, we care a lot about digital data, we care a lot about traditional advertising, radio, television, mail. And we care a lot about monitoring the information flow of the campaign and then keeping an eye on what the campaign is doing. We try to be very sensitive to what they’re trying to do on messaging while still supporting it, because we can’t really coordinate.

So we don’t try to ape what they do but we kind of keep an eye on it and that’s just part of our function here, All super-PACs do that, but there are huge differences in how people are interpreting the law. We’re far more conservative than the Kasich people; they’re doing stuff our lawyers would never allow, so but it’s open to interpretation.

Such as?

I don’t want to get in too much details but the advertising that they’re running is extremely overt for super-PAC advertising as far as Kasich participating and talking to a camera. That is a very aggressive interpretation. We shut our communication down before the wall went down, we had a buffer period, they shut theirs down 30 seconds before. So we’ll see who’s right in the end but we’re pretty conscious about all that stuff.

We’re in a luckier position than the other super-PACs, I think, because I have a long association with Jeb, we go back to the ’97 campaign, ’98 and Sally,¹ who’s the top person down there, she goes back to ’94. So he was rare in that he had two kind of long-term political advisers who had worked very well together, so we had kind of… I think if I were some of these other guys where I’m turning over a bunch of super-PAC responsibilities to somebody I met three months ago I’d be nervous.