WASHINGTON: With four months until Election Day on Nov. 4, and four months since Sen. John McCain secured his party’s nomination, the Arizona senator is relaunching his presidential campaign.

Lagging behind his Democratic rival in opinion polls and facing Republican complaints about a lackluster campaign, McCain ordered another major shake-up of his campaign staff over the July 4 weekend.

Exactly a year after a previous overhaul, the presumptive Republican nominee has marginalized Rick Davis, the campaign manager he put in place then, and handed day-to-day control to Steve Schmidt — a protégé of Karl Rove and the hard-charging veteran of President George W Bush’s 2004 successful re-election bid, — in charge of day-to-day operations.

Schmidt, a shaven-headed, barrel-chested operative known as “the Bullet,” has a reputation for aggressive attacking and counter-attacking, and his promotion signals a greater willingness by McCain to attack Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee.

Senior Republicans have grumbled that McCain has had a muddled campaign message, and say he often seizes on daily headlines without an over-arching theme, and that events have been sloppily organized and decision-making slow.

“Steve is a genius at bringing focus and discipline to a campaign which frankly has needed it,” Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican consultant, told reporters. “He lays down the rail track and runs the train down it. You’ll hear clarity of message.”

The campaign shift shows the McCain team knows it needs to sharpen its message. McCain is currently trailing Obama in the polls and dogged by the dismal approval ratings for the administration of George W. Bush. The goal now is to put out a consistent message each day that can penetrate voters’ minds. The ability to control a certain story line through a 24-hour news cycle is seen as one element of a successful modern political campaign and, so far, Obama has been seen as better at sticking to his chosen theme for a day than has McCain.

The Illinois senator did seem to stumble last Thursday, however, with comments suggesting he was moving away from his promise to pull troops out of Iraq — forcing him to hold a second news conference after a rare admission from the candidate that “I was not clear enough.”

But McCain is known for being even less clear, and his makeover involves a complex task: How to control a politician best known for ask-anything town-hall meetings and long, rambling conversations with reporters on his campaign bus — and, now, on his campaign plane, dubbed the Straight Talk Express.

A top adviser says they considered cutting back on those formats but concluded they couldn’t. “It’s John McCain, it’s his brand.”

One senior adviser said the message will be executed “crisply” from now on. Behind the scenes, the campaign is “crisply” centralizing power.