Word: shrum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Having gone 0 for 8 with Democratic presidential candidates, political consultant Bob Shrum is exporting his golden touch as an adviser to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. On Sept. 24, Brown delivered an address that bore Shrum's fingerprints, including phrases strikingly similar to those in speeches by former clients Bill Clinton and Al Gore. And true to form, Brown's Labour Party promptly dropped in the polls...
...little time and energy talking about the environment during the campaign. Because we told him not to, the consultants said. Why? I asked. Because it wasn't going to help him win. "He wanted to talk about the environment," said Tad Devine, a partner in the firm of Shrum, Devine & Donilon, "and I said to him, 'Look, you can do that, but you're not going to win a single electoral vote more than you now have. If you want to win Michigan and western Pennsylvania, here are the issues that really matter-this is what you should talk about...
...apparently not as interesting as all that: Devine, Bob Shrum and Mike Donilon fitted Senator John Kerry for a similar straitjacket in the 2004 campaign. In some ways, the Kerry campaign was even worse. After all, the Senator was a student of politics. He had spent his entire life hankering for the presidency. And then he proceeded to make precisely the same mistake as Gore, allowing himself to be smothered by his consultants. Perhaps the worst moment came with the Bush Administration torture scandal: How to respond to Abu Ghraib? Hold a focus group. But the civilians who volunteered...
...going to meet the voters where they are," Shrum had told me early in the Kerry campaign, which sounded innocent enough-but what he really meant was, We're going to follow our polling numbers and focus groups. We're going to emphasize the things that voters think are important. In fact, Shrum had it completely wrong. Presidential campaigns are not about "meeting the voters where they are." They are about leadership and character. Mark Mellman, Kerry's lead pollster, figured that out too late. "If you asked people what they were most interested in, they would say jobs, education...
...Party of Sanity, representing the pragmatic centrism of the business and professional elites, and a Party of Passion, representing populist anger about outsourcing, illegal immigration, social permissiveness and Bush's overseas activism. In fact, Democracy Corps-a polling consortium run by Democrats James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum-- tested products named after well-known popularizers of the economic aspects of these points of view: the eminently Sane New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and the surprisingly Passionate CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. Stick around for the results of the Dobbs-vs.-Friedman election, but first ... a few caveats...