John McCain, in an interview with Fox’s Carl Cameron today in Mexico City, appears conflicted on how to discuss the elevation of Steve Schmidt in his campaign.

He doesn’t want to offend Rick Davis, a loyalist who helped McCain brave through the toughest times of the GOP primary.  Nor does he seem to want to fuel the theme of campaign disarray by conceding that he had ordered a second shakeup of his organization in a year.

"Steve has been an integral part of our campaign for a long time and he’s just been taking over some more of the responsibilities," McCain said.  "Rick remains the campaign manager and has overall responsibility.  All of us thought, including Rick, that it would be better to give Steve some of the more responsibilities, as we’ve given other people more responsibilities as the campaign has expanded.”

So, in other words, it’s not really a big change but rather a natural expansion.

But this doesn’t quite satisfy donors, members of Congress and other Republican elites who want reassurance that the page has indeed been turned and that major changes will be brought to the campaign.

So, elsewhere in the interview, he admits that he needs to step it up and and that the outside critiques have not lacked merit.

“We need to keep doing what we’re doing, only do it a lot harder,” McCain told Cameron. “I’m happy with where we’ve come. I’m happy with where we are. We have been declared dead many times. There’s been much criticism, some of it justified, from the media but somehow we seem to stay in the race and we will stay in."