Word: shrum
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...first day was a disaster, with Kerry struggling to keep his answers within the time limits. "He was awful," says one of the few advisers allowed into the shed. Aides Shrum and Ron Klain, who were running the practices, imposed what they called "zero tolerance," and by the time Kerry had drilled a few days, he had figured out how to make those lights his friends. The green one, for instance, would be his cue to pivot from attacking Bush to talking about his own proposals, so that every answer would end on an upbeat note...
...which sounded nice--except that Kerry didn't buy any of it. When he saw the gauzy stump speech his staff had produced from the memo, Kerry told the advisers aboard his plane--Shrum, Sasso, Cutter and McCurry--that the last thing he could afford now was to start sounding like Oprah. Not while Americans were hearing of hostage beheadings and car bombs every night on the news; not while Bush and Cheney were stoking the voters' fears with ads about wolves in the forest and hints of a postelection nuclear holocaust. A warm and fuzzy message now, Kerry said...
Translation of the tape came to Kerry's campaign during the afternoon by way of BlackBerry while the Senator was giving interviews by satellite in West Palm Beach, Fla. Shrum, who cannot type, dictated a brief statement to Josh Gottheimer, one of the campaign's young speechwriters, which they showed to the candidate in the limo on the way to the airport. Kerry deleted only one sentence, the first one, which referred to how bin Laden had castigated both him and the President...
...stand by while their surrogates questioned Kerry's service. Even if the charges were coming from an independent group of veterans, the Kerry camp thought it could rely on the mainstream media to police the situation and inform voters that they were false. Kerry adviser Bob Shrum, says a Democratic strategist, "kept telling Kerry over and over, 'We don't need to respond. It's only a $170,000 ad buy. Nobody will hear...
...Shrum was assuming that the old order was still in place, not realizing that old media and their insurgent competitors are locked in an asymmetrical conflict, with one set of outlets following the traditional conventions of neutrality and balanced coverage and the other not. So when the talk shows began covering the charges, they adhered to those conventions and gave equal time to those leveling the attacks and the Kerry representatives disputing them. "Every credible news organization knocked down their allegations," moans a Democratic strategist--as if that mattered. "They didn't understand what was going on," Howard Dean campaign...