Shrum and Dumber: The Memoirs of a Political Consultant Who Knew How to Lose

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.