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Reviewed: "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner" by Bob Shrum -- a strategist and consultant to presidential candidates Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Kerry and many other Democrats.
Walking around Washington, D.C., telling people you're reading Bob Shrum's forthcoming memoir turns out to be a fantastic small-talk gambit. People are astounded, confused, sympathetic. Someone gave him a book deal? Who would read that? Who would buy it? Good questions, all. But none quite as good as the question of why Shrum wrote the book.
Not, it seems, because he has any particular point to make about campaigns and elections in America, the role of the political consultant in the contemporary Democratic Party, the future of progressive politics, or, indeed, much of anything at all. His tide of anecdotes will entertain anyone interested in horse-race politics and not averse to a little name-dropping (did you know Bob Shrum met Laurence Tribe before he was famous? and Bill Clinton? and James Carville? do you care?), but in his own retelling they add up to almost nothing. A lifetime working at the highest levels of political hackdom, and he's reached essentially no conclusions on any subject of interest -- or, if he has reached any, he seems disinclined to share them. Instead of a book making some point about the world, he's written what is, in effect, Shrum's last campaign -- a race to save his much-tattered reputation as a perennial loser, a man who's lost more presidential campaigns than anyone else alive.
No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner is the title, and the candidate does an admirable job of staying mostly on message, when one takes into account the considerable temptations to backslide. Rather than providing excuses, Shrum wants us to believe, in essence, that his reputation has been sullied unfairly by a cabal of unscrupulous, backbiting Clintonite centrists who have sought to trample him, the progressive standard-bearer who's been fighting for you, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.
And, indeed, Shrum is fairly persuasive in arguing that his bad reputation largely is the result of the backbiting, unprincipled ways of the corrupt cabal of establishment political consultants. Unfortunately, the role of crusading outsider fits Shrum about as well as it fit Al Gore, as this voluminous account of his career makes perfectly clear. Rather, his assessments of political figures and policies are fundamentally grudge-based. The single most loathed figure in the book is Jimmy Carter, who had the temerity to win both the Democratic nomination and the White House after Shrum quit his campaign during a bleak stretch in the 1976 primaries. After Carter's victory, Shrum's career outlook looked bleak. Fortunately for him, Ted Kennedy was willing to give the young speechwriter a job based on his previous work for Ed Muskie and George McGovern, and he served the liberal lion well. A few years later, as a member of the inner circle, Shrum pushed hard in favor of Kennedy's 1980 primary challenge to the incumbent. To a remarkable extent, Shrum still appears to stand by absolutely every criticism the Kennedy campaign ever made of Carter -- that his Afghanistan policy risked plunging the world into nuclear war, and that wage and price controls were the solution to America's late-1970s economic woes -- and even tries to hold Carter responsible for the rise of al-Qaeda, though Osama bin Laden was but a college student during Carter's presidency.
Kennedy lost, of course, but kept his seat in the Senate. Carter, meanwhile, was shown the door by the voters in November, no doubt weakened in part by the need to fend off Kennedy's vigorous intraparty challenge. The resulting Reagan administration was a disaster for the poor and working-class Americans on whose behalf Shrum thinks of himself as toiling, but something of a boon for Shrum himself. With Carter in the White House he was, at best, a nobody who'd alienated the most important Democrats in town. With Carter gone, he was a speechwriter for the most famous Democrat in Congress -- and by most accounts a good one.
This is where the story gets both weird and all too typical. After working for years on Kennedy's staff, Shrum decided he wanted to become a political consultant.
The consultant's racket, especially on the Democratic side, is a good one to break into. Clients who lose wind up leaving office, losing power and stature. The D.C. power structure, meanwhile, is composed of winners, some of whose campaigns you probably worked for in the past. Even better, it's fairly rare for an incumbent to lose, so once you have some significant politicians in your Rolodex you don't need to be especially good at your job to rack up wins. Challengers who hire you and win are in your debt. Challengers who hire you and lose are yesterday's news. And challengers who want credibility with the big-dollar fundraisers and other party kingmakers need to demonstrate that credibility by hiring someone from the circle of established consultants.
It's nice work, if you can get it. And having a powerful senator like Kennedy in your corner is a good way to get it. Never mind that there's no reason to think a person well suited to the job of writing speeches for Kennedy's booming voice, outsize personal story and legacy, and passionate brand of politics would actually be good at a generic political strategist's job. The point, however, is not that Shrum was especially unqualified for his consultant's gig, but that his story stands in for that of his entire profession. Campaign operatives who succeed in any subfield reach for the prize of consultanthood, whether or not there's reason to think they'll be good at it. More to the point, once they reach that prize, it's extremely difficult to dislodge them from it.
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Matthew Yglesias is an associate editor of the Atlantic.
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