An old NYT article on Romney’s Campaign Manager & Drudge-whisperer, Matt Rhoades:

nytimes.com

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.

So important was the Romney camp’s perceived advantage in the eyes of aides to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, that at one point this year they even considered sending an emissary to Miami to build their own relationship with him, two former McCain campaign officials said. (Mr. Drudge ignored the invitation, one of the officials said.)

…

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.