 |
|
|
| |
Bob Shrum - The Donkey King
|
1276 Reads
|
|
|
|
| |
Despite having lived in DC for a while, read about the “Shrum Primary” and met people who worked for him, I have never actually met Bob Shrum. Despite this, however, I have always been a fan of his—if for nothing else his work on Senator Ted Kennedy’s concession speech at the 1980 Democratic convention: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die." He’s a regular on Hardball and retired from political consulting but has also been making the rounds on the various political talk shows to plug his new book, “No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner.” Below is a recent review in the New York Times.
|
|
Donkey King
Timothy Noah
Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate and the editor of “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” an anthology of writings by his late wife, Marjorie Williams
NO EXCUSES
Concessions of a Serial Campaigner
By Robert Shrum
Illustrated. 521 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28
For about 20 years after Edward M. Kennedy was first elected a senator from Massachusetts in 1962, it was reasonable to believe that he might one day become president. He was the sole surviving brother of two martyred political heroes; he was charismatic; he had an impressive record of legislative achievement; and he was passionately committed to New Deal liberalism, which commanded a large and loyal following.
It didn’t happen. The political dynasties that matter today bear the names Bush and Clinton, and the only Kennedy family politician of much interest to the general public is an in-law, a bodybuilder turned actor turned Republican governor whose foreign birth disqualifies him under the Constitution from becoming president. Liberalism itself has fallen into such disrepute that many adherents refuse to call themselves liberals. Why these changes came about is the subject of endless argument, but one consequence is that Robert Shrum, a Kennedy speechwriter who became a political consultant, lost his chance to make history.
Instead, Shrum set about writing history. Now retired from consulting, Shrum has produced a lively and indiscreet memoir about his three decades at the center of Democratic presidential politics, from Edmund Muskie’s failed primary bid in 1972 (in one memorably chilly scene, Muskie’s wife asks whether he likes the painting she’s just given him for their wedding anniversary and he replies, “No”) to John Kerry’s general election defeat in 2004 (Shrum relates the campaign’s collective sigh of relief when the networks declined to show footage of Kerry at an Iowa party jokingly miming a toke while Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary sang “Puff the Magic Dragon”).
To Shrum, confidentiality between a candidate and his political consultant is apparently time-limited, even when the candidate remains vulnerable to public opprobrium. Gleefully tattling on the current presidential candidate John Edwards, on whose 1998 Senate campaign Shrum consulted, he says Edwards “didn’t know much about the issues” and couldn’t be persuaded “to read the briefing books.” When Shrum asked Edwards his position on gay rights, he replied, “I’m not comfortable around those people.” (Edwards’s wife and his pollster, who were there, have said Shrum took this remark out of context.) Should Al Gore run for president again, he’ll most likely resent Shrum’s dishing that on the day of the New Hampshire primary, Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign sent the candidate’s vice-presidential motorcade to an area of the state where his chief rival, Bill Bradley, was known to be popular. The unacknowledged purpose — explained to Gore only afterward, Shrum insists — was to snarl traffic, thereby impeding Bradley supporters driving to the polls. Is it unethical for Shrum to write about these things? I’m too beguiled by his narrative to give that question the weight it probably deserves.
The one politician about whom Shrum is comparatively circumspect is Ted Kennedy, on whose 1980 presidential primary campaign Shrum served before joining Kennedy’s Senate staff. Shrum wrote Kennedy’s concession speech at the Democratic National Convention (“the dream shall never die”), which upstaged the acceptance speech of the nominee and incumbent, Jimmy Carter, and was meant to. (In 1976 Shrum had worked exactly 10 days on Carter’s campaign before he resigned, having concluded that the candidate lacked conviction.) Kennedy’s convention speech was Shrum’s ticket to a Camelot whose turrets and parapets, he had to know, were dissolving in the evening mist. He left Kennedy to start his own consulting firm in 1985, about a year before the senator finally relinquished his presidential ambitions. But Shrum remained a devoted acolyte; in the book, Kennedy comes across as a sort of Irish Dalai Lama, infinitely benevolent and wise.
Shrum’s book is titled “No Excuses,” which suggests it’s an apologia. Really, though, it isn’t. (“No Apologies” would have been a more accurate title.) Shrum received heavy criticism after his clients Gore and Kerry lost to George W. Bush. Joe Klein of Time magazine was particularly savage. In his 2006 book, “Politics Lost,” Klein called Shrum an “industrial assembly-line consultant” whose candidates spouted “nativism, isolationism, protectionism, paranoia.” Shrum rejects this caricature in some passages of his book and comes close to embracing it in others. “I’d hardly thought about the trade issue,” he writes, when his client Dick Gephardt placed unfair Japanese trade practices at the center of his unsuccessful 1988 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. But in 1992, Shrum posed the presidential-primary candidate Bob Kerrey in front of a hockey net, where Kerrey said it was “time to play a little defense” in trade talks. A Newsweek reporter asked Kerrey to square the TV spot with his Senate voting record as a free-trade advocate, and Kerrey answered that the ad was “a mistake.” Shrum concedes he was unwise to talk Kerrey into making the ad, but the real problem, he suggests, was that Kerrey was a flake, “a Walt Whitmanesque character who, in effect, could happily say to voters: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well.’ ”
During the 2000 general election campaign, Shrum cheered Gore’s shift toward more populist themes, but he says this shift wasn’t his doing: “He was moving in that direction on his own.” Advising Kerry four years later, Shrum felt “partially disabled by my own reputation as too ideological, too left, too populist.” He therefore tried to avoid pushing Kerry in that direction. After Kerry lost, though, Shrum regretted that he hadn’t urged the candidate to maintain “the harder-edged, progressive language of the primaries” through Election Day, even though the campaign’s own research had indicated it wouldn’t sell. Populism had, in fact, never sold in any presidential campaign Shrum participated in (as opposed to his House, Senate and gubernatorial races, in which it enjoyed considerably more success).
Robert Shrum’s idea of self-criticism is not to question the wisdom of his advice, but rather to regret that he didn’t impose that advice more forcefully. That’s a failing when your job is to win elections. But you can’t say Shrum lacks ideals. He was just born too late, or perhaps too early, to put them into action.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| Posted by: Unregistered on Friday, August 03, 2007 - 08:11 AM
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
