I've been reading Bob Shrum's book. I eviscerated the guy in CTG, and it was well-deserved on his part; but that doesn't deny that the guy can write, even if it's revisionist at times (in the case of the Edwards).

Anyway, there's a great quote that he has from Hubert Humphrey, over lunch with George McGovern, made about the "reformer" Dukakis, who'd just called Humphrey "as an outworn relic of the old politics" just as Dukakis was winning his first race in MA, in the late 70's:

Apply that to the cunning 'reform' debate over superdelegates, and about the greater need to win in 2008.

There's more...

Long-time Democratic strategist and speechwriter Bob Shrum has been getting a lot of press lately because of his new book.  In the book, he reveals juicy gossip about several of the current Presidential candidates.  But he also tries to recover his own tarnished reputation.  The Politico has a great summary of the book.

Bob Shrum, veteran of eight unsuccessful presidential campaigns, including Gore-Lieberman and Kerry-Edwards, has titled his autobiography "No Excuses." By page 5, he has offered 16 of them for his 0-8 record, and he's only getting started. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/060 7/4603.html

(More below the fold)

There's more...

On NBC's Meet The Press today, Tim Russert asks Bob Shrum about the recent controversy surrounding him and John Edwards on Iraq.  Shrum stands his ground and does not back down from John Edwards claim that Shrum did not influence Edwards' voting decision on Iraq.

Excerpt from 6/3/07 Meet the Press:  Shrum vs. Edwards

There's more...

One of the side benefits of being a prominent blogger is that I receive a free copy of virtually every politically related book written by a Democrat or a progressive. Typically, my extensive writing demands keep me from reading many of these books. However, today's excerpt of Bob Shrum's new book in Time has piqued my interest enough to consider reading the whole thing:

That fall, as a vote loomed on the resolution giving Bush authority to go to war, Edwards convened a circle of advisers in his family room in Washington to discuss his decision. He was skeptical, even exercised about the idea of voting yes. Elizabeth was a forceful no. She didn't trust anything the Bush administration was saying. But the consensus view from both the foreign policy experts and the political operatives was that even though Edwards was on the Intelligence Committee, he was too junior in the Senate; he didn't have the credibility to vote against the resolution. To my continuing regret, I said he had to be for it. As I listened to this, I watched Edwards's face; he didn't like where he was being pushed to go. The process violated a principle I'd learned long before--candidates have to trust their own deeply felt instincts. It's the best way to live with defeat if it comes, and probably the best way to win.

The meeting we held in the Edwardses' family room did him a disservice; of course, he was the candidate and if he really was against the war, it was up to him to stand his ground. He didn't. If he had, it almost certainly would have been Edwards and not Dean who emerged early on as the antiwar candidate. But Edwards didn't want to look "liberal" and out of the mainstream; he was, after all, the southern candidate and thought of himself as Clintonesque. He valued the advice and prized the support of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. I had my own concerns: If he took the antiwar route, I knew I would have been characterized as a malign force moving him to the left--which wasn't true, although I wish it had been given that I now regard the Iraq invasion as one of the great mistakes in the history of U.S. foreign policy.

It is hard to know how much of this is accurate, and how much of it is Shrum trying to intuit the thoughts of others. However, leaving aside what these two paragraphs say about John Edwards for a moment, this passage seems to perfectly sum up a certain type of loser beltway mentality that has been infecting Democrats for too long. On the one hand, there was Elizabeth Edwards, who was rightly skeptical of anything the Bush administration was trying to sell. On the other hand there was a cadre of foreign policy "experts" and professional political operatives who conceptualized the decision to go to war in Iraq not in terms of whether or not it was a good foreign policy decision, but rather in whether or not opposing the war would make someone look too left-wing, and whether or not someone was in Congress long enough to have the credibility to combat that charge. This is truly a view through the looking glass, where the Democratic political establishment is playing by its own set of made up rules that bear no resemblance to the way the public actually makes political decisions. A generally disengaged, non-ideological electorate does not vote with a crude, linear, ideological spectrum in mind, nor does it consider how long someone has served in the Senate as in anyway relevant to what that person thinks about war in Iraq. And yet, these are the insane rules we have constructed for ourselves.

Returning to Edwards for a moment, I don't actually find this passage to be a particularly damning characterization of his political instincts or lack of leadership. Rather, I think is shows how his decision to originally support the war in Iraq probably served as a useful object lesson for a politician still trying to find his comfort zone. In 2002-2003, against his own instincts, against the advice of his wife, and against what he had seen as a member of the Intelligence Committee, Edwards listened instead to the contorted rationalizations of the Democratic establishment. Unsurprisingly, that establishment was also entirely wrong about the Iraq war, which has indeed become one of the biggest mistakes this country has made in decades. It is difficult to imagine a better way to learn to trust yourself then the catastrophic results of not trusting yourself on Iraq. Considering the many ways that Edwards has since bucked that same establishment--not firing McEwan and Marcotte, being the first to refuse a Fox News debate, publicly apologizing for his vote on Iraq, developing a populist, anti-corporate message--my belief is that Edwards learned from his past misplacement of trust in the Democratic establishment and the DLC, and has decided instead to trust his own, far more progressive instincts. For a politician who has been in the game for less than a decade, such a transformation seems entirely believable and genuine.

Ok, so Harold Ickes is trying to raise $25 million for a new 527 to focus on field and advertising.  Rahm Emanuel is hiring the Bob Shrum of field operations, Michael Whouley, to run his DCCC field plan.  And another 527 with a presumed budget of $8-10 million is being run by former DNC bigwigs Martin Frost, Tony Coehlo, Joe Andrew, and Don Fowler.  

Ok, let's look at what's going on here.  

Ickes is tied into the Hillary Clinton axis and the Glover Park Group, which was busted today lobbying for the Dubai Ports deal.  Ickes is behind the disastrous Datamart voterfile project, which is project managed by Laura Quinn, the person who screwed up Demzilla in 2004 under Terry McAuliffe and was somehow hired again to screw up another voterfile.  

Whouley has a massive telecom contract through his firm Dewey Square, which is tasked with passing the Stevens bill eviscerating net neutrality.  He's been all over losing Presidential campaigns, most recently Kerry's in 2004.  And he's not only in charge of the DCCC field plan, but he's also managed to convince donors to give him $3 million to map out yet another losing Presidential field strategy in 2008.

And of course, Tony Coehlo really takes the cake.  Coehlo more than any individual is responsible for the decline of the Democratic Party - he literally has his fingerprints all over every moral and political debacle of the last twenty five years, from the introduction of rivers of business PAC money into the party in 1982 to the Congressional loss of 1994 to Gore's snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory in 2000.  In the process, Coehlo had to leave Congress under a cloud of scandal, and became a millionaire almost instantly after he left.  Hmm.

Seriously, donors need to be retrained.  Why are they giving money to the people responsible for putting the party in the awful shape it is in?  These people are not as famous as Bob Shrum, but they should be.  These are the people that are anonymous senior strategists leaking to the New York Times about how worried they are about Democrats taking a stand on this issue or that one (often with undisclosed financial conflicts of interest), or getting Adam Nagourney to write process pieces about Howard Dean's questionable stewardship of the DNC.  These are the people that buy broadcast and waste buckets of cash paying off their media buyer and pollster friends/business partners.  This is the all white mostly male circuit that is alienating minority Democratic influentials through their insular arrogance.

This is the establishment.  And they are not winners, unless you consider getting Bob Shrum a new boat a victory for the Democratic Party.  

Just so you know.

There's more...