What We Can Learn from Bob Shrum

It would be a shame, and unfair to Bob Shrum, if his book, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner, were consulted only for embarrassing tales told about distinguished clients. Shrum is among the consultants -- and maybe even the consultant -- who can illuminate the mysterious and modern course of the Democratic Party as the progressive alternative. His achievement is in part that his name has become a brand for consultancy in our times, on the Democratic side, and his story is one through which an important part of the party's history can be told.

In Shrum's brilliant career is found the tension experienced more broadly by the party between high progressive ideals and the longing for success, between the wish to be in the winner's circle while arguing the case for those left outside of it. Shrum put his energies into the revival of populism, but he expended these efforts from Georgetown drawing rooms and in the company of the coastal elites. He is associated at once with Edward Kennedy's "The Dream Will Never Die" speech and with a profession, political consultancy, that has fared exceptionally well off the commissions and fees paid by the many candidates in the market to win with any message well-fitted to that purpose.

Winning or losing: this is the dramatic theme threading throughout his account. Over the course of Shrum's career, and partly because of his own celebrity and success, consultants, those Sorcerers of Victory, emerged from behind the candidates and took their place alongside them on the public stage. This happened in both parties: it was a consequence of changes in the political process, including the declining (or least changing) role of parties. For Democrats, however, the reverberation of this change within their own party was more fateful.

Democrats pride themselves on not being a corporate party, not a natural heir to the soap-selling practice of the Madison Avenue retinue first assembled by Richard Nixon and immortalized by Joe McGuiness in The Selling of the President l968. The triumph of consultancy as the key to winning was a triumph of corporate thinking about Data and Message, with an eye fixed resolutely on sales. Politics cannot help but be transformed by method. Shrum insists that methods can be controlled and he gives the example of "polling and focus groups [which] can measure how best to sell voters ideas you believe in." But data also identifies the ideas that will sell, which can then, and only naturally, become the ideas that polling's voracious consumers come to believe in.

The object, after all, is to win, and the costs of defeat are high. Shrum writes that "it was easy to get blamed for a loss and hard to get credit on the crowded stage of victory": the consultant, the architect of victory or the goat of defeat, risks becoming "a target". Shrum traces his passage through these pressures, from his early days when he primarily wrote speeches and threw himself in the McGovern and l980 Kennedy campaigns, to his years as a Consultant Celebrity. The political intensity of the account tails off notably from the his first to the last campaigns, from the years of youthful idealism to the rise of the world-beating consultancy. Causes blur into a Career. Leaders he admired become Clients. Speeches of which he is proud are replaced by the negative ads about which he is defensive. Great debates on the party future turn to squabbles about tactics and to personal conflicts.

It is true that, in these stories, Shrum often puts himself in the best possible light, but not always, nor on all points. Of his career after the l980 presidential campaign -- the onset of Consultancy -- that it would "a mix of ambition and belief", and that one of the lessons he learned about this market was that "losing is a cardinal sin." He regrets some of the clients he took and some of the ads that he made. But he argues that he has stayed true to his Populist convictions, a match of strategy and genuine conviction.

It is less clear if the consultancy version of Populism has become a commodity, brushed off as needed, or an angle that can be played to good effect from time to time. In these pages, the Populist stakes are reduced to fine but hotly debated questions of branding, such as whether Al Gore in 2000 should have been the candidate "fighting for ordinary families, not the wealthy special interests", or should have stood for "the people, not the powerful." Populism as presented here has very much of a Potemkin Village presentation.

So it would be wrong to come away dejected from this well-written book, wishing that Shrum had written about the Democratic Party on a more substantive, less tactical level, The book he wrote is just about that: it shows how a party's politics can became immersed in tactics at some expense to its sense of mission, and it exposes the difficulty of maintaining a war against the Establishment if your field generals have set up camp there.

Shrum maintains that he has kept his head and his faith and continues to believe -- as he believes that Bill Clinton did not -- that his party must represent "something more than a set of poll-tested programs and a carefully engineered set of tactics to win office." His appeal is to ideology but also, inevitably, to tactical considerations, for he is certain that a party casual about its convictions is "likely to lose".

As it happens, Shrum's book has been published during a new phase of the party's history, the remarkable rise of the blogosphere. Here is a force, hostile to calculation and insistent on creedal purity, almost consciously opposed to the consultancies. Not without their excesses -- they can mimic the oversimplification of the 30 second spot and apply pressure like a special interest -- bloggers demand that the party hold tight to a progressive program and unflinchingly accept the consequences.

But what will happen in the next presidential election when the choice seems clear and losing becomes unimaginable? Almost certainly, in the blogosphere and throughout the party, there will be considerable interest in what Bob Shrum has to say.