In Defense of Shrum
To the degree that the current Democratic Party has a message, to be submitted to the public at large, it’s Bob Shrum’s message.
Hard to tell if it’s a “winning message”. A hefty percentage of Democratic Senators and Governors owe their toughest victories to Bob Shrum.
On the other hand, a heck of a lot of unelected and nonelected Democrats lost with Bob Shrum.
Most famously, the list of Democratic hopefuls for the presidency that he’s “helped”: George McGovern in 1972. Edward Kennedy in 1980. Richard Gephardt in 1988. Bob Kerrey in 1992. Al Gore in 2000.
And, he quit after ten days with Jimmy Carter in 1976, due to a conflict in his conscience. I don’t know who he picked himself up to for 1976 after that (perhaps Edward Kennedy?), and I’m not sure who he fought for in 1984 (perhaps Mondale) — or if he didn’t get on board with either one and ended up on the Dukakis team –, but altogether, he is 0 for 7 in presidential campaigns.
You can’t win them all… can you?
Listening to John Kerry’s acceptance speech, I listened for the key Bob Shrum buzz-words. “Fighting for you” (or a variation of that theme) came out, by my count, twice. A relatively disappointingly meager amount: a panoply of phrases sprinked through the entire speech would have been far more entertaining in the “Drinking Game” schematic, or in the case of just watching the speech — a giggle knowingly match.
During the run up to the Democratic primary campaign, back before Al Gore bowed out of the race, we heard much hemming and hawing — most classically from Joseph Lieberman — that Al Gore lost when he abondoned the “DLC ethos” and took on the Bob Shrum – infused rhetoric that comes with the phrase “The People Versus the Powerful.”
Without parsing out the veracity of that particular phrase (Al Gore has been the vice president for the past eight years, and is of the “powerful”, ain’t he? Is he serious? How can someone who just picked Joe Lieberman as running mate be serious?)… it was the correct message politically.
Al Gore’s campaign would have sputtered before even getting off the ground without it. His campagin was completely and utterly dead before that particular campaign acceptance speech — started the summer of 1999 being fifteen or so points behind in a theoretical matchup with the publically unknown, but cash-infused, George W Bush.
There’s a marked depression I get staring at the electoral map. George W. has more red state electoral votes solidly sewn up than Al Gore — and now John Kerry — has blue state electoral votes sewn up. Al Gore had to win a majority fo the swing states up for grabs… pretty much, he had to nearly run the table. John Kerry has a similar task.
Al Gore just about accomplished that coup, and if that’s not enough, the Democrats in 2000 managed to run the table on close Senate races up for grabs.
It’s for this reason (as well as the fact that Gore was consistently shown slightly behind Bush in the national polls) that the talk throughout the 2000 campaign was “You know, Al Gore just might win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote.” It turned out the other way around (Florida being fishy), and that’s sort of not too surprising either (two Senators in every state.) That talk has resurfaced in the 2004 campaign. (I hear that there’s a news article from the summer or fall of 2000, available in the archives of some news site, about how Bush was preparing himself to fight a post-election battle in case that happened.)
But a few chads punched through in Florida, and the Al Gore campaign would’ve been hailed as a work of genius! Sputtering at the start, found its voice in the summer, and withstood some varieties of difficulty from there on out.
The generic populist message was necessary to define a difference with the other guy, and his vaguely defined “Compassionate Conservatism.” I’m not defending the “liberal” position over the “centrist” position here: Bill Clinton’s strategy was, obviously, the best one for his two campaigns… but in 2000? You have to somehow build on that and suggest a slightly different direction (Bush was suggesting only a moderately more conservative version of the same direction, bottom line: tax cuts and no scary Newt-cuts.) It’s not much about the message so much as it is about a message.
Without Bob Shrum, or some force like Bob Shrum, Al Gore would have been dead.
Now, how do I explain the other seven campaigns (including the current lackadasical Kerry campaign?) Well…
Kerry says that he knows Bob Shrum’s strengths, and that he knows Bob Shrum’s weaknesses.