My Interview With Political Consultant Robert Shrum Over His Memoir, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner

I've heard of Robert Shrum many times over the years but never expected to have a chance to interview him. But that's exactly the opportunity that presented itself when I was sent a paperback copy of his memoir.
I combined their questions with some of my own and the following is the result.
If you have follow-up questions you would like me to ask list them below and I'll consider asking them for the second half of this interview. Normally, though, with author interviews the first part focuses on the person and the second half on the book itself. If any of you have read the book I'd be particularly interested in any questions you would like me to ask.

Scott: What sparked you to write this book?
I have spent a longer period of time than almost any operative at the top levels of Democratic politics and most of what I've read about politics was sanitized, carefully costumed, and not very real. I wanted to write a book that would remove the papier-mache exterior and show the very human moments of laughter, of intense hope and intense sorrow that are part of the campaign trail. You stand with John Kerry in an elevator on election night, looking at the exit polls thinking you've won, and I'm calling him "Mr. President." Little did I know that 7 hours later things would be very different. I would be telling him he'd lost—we'd lost. I should have known better after what happened in 2000. So I wanted to give people a sense of what it was really like.
To what do you ascribe the "Shrum curse?" Do you fear that one day your obituary will allude to said curse?
I think that is almost inevitable, but I hope far in the future. People will look up everything that has been written on the internet, and the phrase is too arresting not to use.
As for the "curse;" I think Al Gore won in 2000, he just wasn't inaugurated. John Kerry almost won. There's a bottom line here. The margins are narrow and fragile and you live with that. But I've had the privilege of working with people who stood for the right things. So the obituary writers can write whatever they want. I've been very lucky. I've been able to make a living doing what I love most.
You know, the other side of the Shrum curse is we always won the nomination. This year some people discovered that winning the nomination is not as easy as they thought.
Which of the presidential candidates you worked with was the most frustrating?
Muskie was the most frustrating not because he was not a really decent person, but because he wasn't a very happy person. Once he slapped his deputy press secretary with a wet towel, and he threw a lead crystal donkey at me. He was so much the frontrunner, trying to please everyone and as I say in the book -- when you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Muskie is respected as a significant force, the legislative father of the environmentalist movement. He just wasn't a very good presidential candidate.
Given the chance to do it over again would you have refused to be hired by any candidates? Which ones?
Definitely not the presidential candidates, or most of the candidates I worked for. But I wish I had never been associated with Jim Mattox, who ran against Ann Richards for Governor in Texas. He started hurling irresponsible allegations about drug use. I thought it was way out of bounds. So did another of Mattox's consultants, James Carville. His solution was in effect to deny that he ever knew the guy.
But I was involved in thirty winning senate campaigns, ten for governor, elections for mayor in most major American cities and overseas victories for presidents and prime ministers from Colombia to Britain, Ireland, and Israel. I am grateful that I have been able to be a part of so many campaigns that mattered. For example, my friend Barbara Mikulski hired me in 1986 when she ran for the Senate in Maryland and made history as the first Democratic woman ever elected to the Senate on her own.
At Wikipedia it says of this book, "It has received attention in the media for its less than flattering portrayal of Shrum's former client, John Edwards." Would you say that as a fair summary? Has Edwards contacted you since then and what did he say about the book?
He hasn't contacted me, although some of his campaign went after the book. I thought the Edwards portrait was of someone who had never been in politics before he ran for the Senate in 1998, but who grew considerably after he took office. Had he followed his own instincts in 2002 and voted against the Iraq war, he might have won the 2004 nomination. I think the part that most upset the Edwards folks was the passage on gay rights. Edwards told me he wasn't comfortable around "those people."
But of course he came to Washington, learned a lot, and changed. I never understood why he or his people got as upset as they did. I thought that with Edwards the book told the story of the evolution of a politician, one of the few naturals I ever met in my life. So I wrote what happened; just because people don't like it, I can't rewrite it.
What have been the high points and low points in your political consulting career?
One was certainly Al Gore's acceptance speech at the 2000 Convention. He went into that Convention 10 or 12 or 13 points behind, depending on whose poll you believed. Two days after the speech the polls showed him 4 or 5 points ahead. It's the biggest "bounce" from any acceptance speech in history
There have been several high points that didn't quite work out, one of them in 2000 as well. On election day we knew Al Gore had won. When my colleague Carter Eskew and I got a call from Gore at two in the afternoon telling us about the exit polls—that showed we were going to win—I stood at a bookstore in Nashville and quietly cried. They were tears of happiness; it had been such a tough campaign, and Gore had taken so much flak. But of course that high was matched by the low point that came later that night when the networks call of Florida for Gore was withdrawn, the Florida shenanigans began, and then over a month later the Supreme Court acted like a ward committee and handed victory to George Bush by one vote. I guess it really was the closest presidential election in history, determined by one of the most infamous Supreme Court decisions in history.
Another high point came in 2004 on the night of the Iowa caucuses. Everyone had written John Kerry off; for awhile, we rode around through the cold and the snow in Iowa and New Hampshire without a press core even following us. Then on the bus, as the Iowa Caucuses were convening, one of the young network "imbeds"—the underpaid, neophyte journalists who are sent out with cameras to follow the candidates—tapped me on the shoulder and handed me the results of the entry poll, in which people were asked who they were for as they went into the caucuses. Kerry hadn't just survived; he had won. I passed the piece of paper across the aisle to Kerry. I just couldn't say anything other than to tell the candidate what it was. He looked at the numbers and we wordlessly embraced each other.
The low point that came in November was eerily similar to 2000, although the drama played out much more swiftly, in a series of phone calls that continued past midnight on election day, reporting that Florida, Ohio, and so the presidency were slipping away. The exit polls had been wrong again.
There is a high point from 2004 that couldn't be taken away—Kerry's performance in the debates. He crushed Bush in the first debate, and ironically, painfully from my perspective, became the first candidate in history to win all the presidential debates and lose the election.
Kerry came so achingly close, and Gore was robbed. I'm proud that I worked for both of them. I think they would have been superb presidents. And I am certainly happy that I didn't work for George W. Bush who has been a historic disaster—on the economy, on healthcare, and on foreign policy—where John Kerry was right to say that Bush has led us into "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."
And then there was Senator Kennedy's speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, which for me and so many others summed up what the Democratic Party is really all about. That speech is still a touchstone for a lot of us—and is Kennedy himself. The kind of senator he's been and the kind of stands he's taken show that principle actually matters in politics. .
What do you make of Scott McClellan's' book and the reaction it received?
What's interesting about the reaction is not that we were surprised that some of the highest officials in the administration were involved in exposing Valerie Plame Wilson, or that the intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was manipulated or maybe manufactured, but that a loyalist from the inside finally 'fessed up. We all know the truth. What's striking is that someone we never would have expected to hear it from came forward. That's what gave the book power.
What was the worst mistake a candidate you worked for made and how did you help spin it? Or is spin the wrong word for what you do?
I wish John Kerry had not said that he "voted for" the 70 billion dollar appropriation to fund the Iraq war before he "voted against it." What he was supposed to say—what he had said before—was that he had supported the bill when it was paid for and when it set standards and benchmarks for a future course in Iraq.
But that day he was speaking to an audience in West Virginia full of veterans; as someone who has served himself, he really wanted them to know that he was on the troops' side. Politicians have an almost irresistible urge to please the immediate audience. He tried to do it that day by discarding nuance and his unfortunate clarity gave life to a flip flop argument that up to that point had been going exactly nowhere. As he said during the debates, he made a mistake in how he talked about the war; Bush made a mistake in leading us into war in Iraq. Which was worse?
In the book, I wanted to be honest about mistakes, including my own. After the Kerry campaign decided to take federal funding—a decision I opposed—we agreed that we had to be off television in August because our convention was a month earlier than Bush's; we had to cover thirteen weeks to the general election with the same amount of money he had for eight weeks. We needed to husband out resources for the final push. Then the swiftboat controversy arose. It was a mistake not to react swiftly—a mistake I was complicit in. We just should have forgotten our agreement and gone on television with a tough response ad. It took us ten days—and it was Kerry who from the start kept asking why we didn't go all out to respond.
Do you have any thoughts on the movie "Recount" and/or my comments on it here?
Having lived through those painful 37 days--and then seeing George Bush inaugurated after an election he didn't win--I just haven't been able to bring myself to see the movie yet. I will at some point.
What's the biggest wrong stereotype about you?
I'm not sure I'm a very good judge of that. Sometimes it's been suggested that I don't want a lot of other talent around. That's absolutely false. I saw political consulting as a place where you could take some satisfaction in encouraging talent, but couldn't keep people down. For example, Joe Trippi and Steve McMahon, Howard Dean's advisors in 2004, have been associates in my firm. Later on, frustrated by the lack of African-Americans in the front ranks of political consulting, I tried to recruit Donna Brazile as a partner. In fact, one of the things I've been most proud of is that I work with younger people. You have to prize talent and you always have to leave room for talent.
What are you most tired of being asked , besides about the "curse"?
To be honest, I don't mind being asked most questions. I love politics, and elections matter. And I like people, and honor their caring and their natural curiosity to find out what really happened.
From your perspective and understanding of the DNC, what effects and changes do you see for the DNC should Senator Obama become president? Moving forward, do you think the DNC will focus less on big donors and focus more on the individual donors?How has the Internet changed the political process? Can you give an example of a way it has changed for the better and an example of how it has changed for the worse?
I've already described its democratizing impact in terms of financing campaigns. But it also gives ordinary citizens a greater chance than ever to have their opinions heard, to form groups of likeminded people and conduct a real conversation that can actually influence a campaign.
Change for the worse? Someone can print anything, say anything, and there's little or no filter or fact check. Maybe it's self-correcting to some extent, but when you look at some of the smears against Obama-and some of the credibility they have acquired-you understand that the internet is also a superhighway for the kind of scurrilous rumors it can be very hard to catch up with."