In the January/February issue of Washington Monthly, Amy Sullivan wrote a devastating and eye-opening piece on Democratic consultants and their history of being rewarded for repeated failures.
Hansen and Mellman are joined by the poster boy of Democratic social promotion, Bob Shrum. Over his 30-year career, Shrum has worked on the campaigns of seven losing presidential candidates—from George McGovern to Bob Kerrey—capping his record with a leading role in the disaster that was the Gore campaign. Yet, instead of abiding by the “seven strikes and you’re out” rule, Democrats have continued to pay top dollar for his services (sums that are supplemented by the percentage Shrum’s firm, Shrum, Devine & Donilon, gets for purchasing air time for commercials). Although Shrum has never put anyone in the White House, in the bizarro world of Democratic politics, he’s seen as a kingmaker—merely hiring the media strategist gives a candidate such instant credibility with big-ticket liberal funders that John Kerry and John Edwards fought a fierce battle heading into the 2004 primaries to lure Shrum to their camps. Ultimately, Shrum chose Kerry, and on Nov. 3, he extended his perfect losing record.
On January 12th, Bob Shrum announced his retirement, the New York Times reported. I don’t believe the timing of Shrum’s announcement was a coincidence. It makes me wonder what the political landscape would look like had Sullivan written this four years ago. Erick Erickson, editor at Redstate.org, is a Republican consultant and he offered some insights into this strange world.
There are a few problems in the political consulting field and, unlike Ms. Sullivan, I think the problems extend across party lines, though I concede that the Dems are more pathetic than the Republicans on this front.
First, consultants like Hansen have an incestuous relationship with the party. Hansen is a field director for the DSCC. He is also a consultant who likes to do direct mail. When candidates show up at the DSCC, there is a nervous tension between Hansen as staffer and Hansen as consultant. Candidates are put in an awkward position if they do not want to use Hansen for direct mail. Political consultants and party staffers are not and should not be the same animal. It cuts out a needed layer of objectivity.
Second, consultants need to pick a field and, if they want to be a general consultant, they should refrain from engaging in other areas beyond ensuring strategy integrity. Bob Shrum, for example, likes to be a general consultant. Shrum’s talents, however, focus on the media. Media consultants get paid a commission based on ad buys. General consultants get paid a salary. Shrum gets both because he acts as a general consultant and the media consultant. This cuts out a level of outside creativity.
Third, consultants need to know their place. Sullivan is right. There are too many political consultants on the Democratic side who have taken on a larger than life role: Carville, Begala, Shrum, Mellman, and (to a lesser extent) Trippi, to name a few. The media strokes their ego and candidates, based on the press driven biographies, pursue these consultants because of the connections they have. Consultants should be heard by their candidates and rarely, if ever, seen. The larger the consultant’s profile, the more he works for himself and not for his candidate.
[…]
To solve their problem, Democrats should adopt some easy rules. First, party political staffers should only be party political staffers. Second, consultants should have a defined role and general consultants should not also be cutting the commercials, designing the mail, and talking to the press. Third, if a consultant has a string of failures, he should get bumped down to the minor league races for retraining. Lastly, Democrats, much more than Republicans, should work to devalue the system of consultant connections. Having the right consultant will always build natural alliances. But, picking a consultant should not be seen as the path to money. The consultant should be seen as the path to victory and those two paths are not the same.
Changing courses a little, Dan Gerstein was one of the few who named sources in Amy Sullivan’s article, and he’s lobbying strongly for Simon Rosenberg as chair of the DNC. I don’t know much about the guy, but he can’t be worse than McAuliffe. I also don’t have a problem with Howard Dean as chair (since full disclosure is now the rage, I’m a guest writer at Dean Nation).
Changing courses yet again (sometimes you just go where the links take you), the other two main articles in the current Washington Monthly are also pretty good. While I’m clearly not on their side of the political aisle, I appreciate the candor and forthrightness of their writing (Drum included). One of the articles casts a wide net for possible 2008 presidential contenders, with one of the more intriguing choices being Bill Cosby. Hey, hey, hey, love to play tackle. Give them credit for creativity and imagination, but I think I’ll pass on considering Queen Noor and Ted Turner. Their other main piece addresses the benefits of the Clear Skies initiative. A key nugget:
John Kerry summed up the conventional wisdom on the left during his second debate with President Bush by observing that Clear Skies is “one of those Orwellian names [sic]. . . . If they just left the Clean Air Act all alone the way it is today—no change—the air would be cleaner than it is if you passed the Clear Skies Act.” In fact, this oft-repeated green bromide turns out to be false. But the dispute over the bill’s impact is only part of the story of how the perfect has become the enemy of the good in the clean air wars. The battle over Clear Skies has shaped up as a classic Washington tale of a creditable endeavor hopelessly mismanaged by its sponsor, demagogued by its opponents, and tainted from the start by the administration’s well-earned reputation as handmaidens of industry. The resulting gridlock could delay attempts to clean up the environment and cost thousands of Americans their lives.
I hope Whitman’s speaking truth to the environmental powers works just as well as Sullivan’s to consultants. One other notion that Whitman advanced was the existence of a Thin Green Line:
The response of environmental advocates to Clear Skies is not altogether surprising, given the movement’s loathing for Bush and his appointees, many of whom were drawn from the ranks of industry lobbyists. Yet for many years, green advocates have often shown a self-destructive intolerance for compromise. Many activists chastised Al Gore when he was vice president for his environmental record, though Gore was the most informed and committed environmentalist to ever fill the vice presidency. (In 1999, Time ran an article in its Earth Day issue with the headline “Is Al Gore a Hero or a Traitor?”) Ultimately, the environmental movement’s intense pressure to hold ranks—call it the thin green line—precluded honest debate about Clear Skies.
Just one environmental organization, the Adirondack Council, testified in support of Clear Skies. For its efforts, the Adirondack Council was promptly named the “Clean Air Villain of the Month” in April 2002 by the Clean Air Trust, a hall of shame award ordinarily bestowed on big polluters and their industry-friendly lawmakers. The Clean Air Trust singled out the Adirondack Council for censure in part because it had “broken ranks with other environmental groups.” Yet the Adirondack Council was no industry shill. It had sued EPA to stiffen the agency’s 1990 Acid Rain program guidelines, and testified before Congress that the timetable for Clear Skies’ emission caps should be sped up. The non-profit favored Clear Skies because the bill mandated large reductions in the two primary pollutants contributing to the acid rain that had riddled the Adirondack Park. To other advocates, however, that was no excuse for dissent.
Seems like this is another example where the perfect has become the enemy of the good.
Yet for many years, green advocates have often shown a self-destructive intolerance for compromise.
And yet, it seems to be working for the Republicans (and, for that matter, conservativism in general). Why do you think that is?
[BTW, that’s not snark, though it sounds like it. I’m genuinely curious why the left’s refusal to compromise is so damaging nowadays, yet the right’s refusal to compromise is not.]
My explanation for the Thin Green Line is that committed environmentalists seem always to savor of misanthropy. Because the planet won’t be paradise until we’re gone, it doesn’t really matter what we accomplish. Until a truly humanist environmentalism emerges, the issue is going to remain destructively divisive – like all fundamentalist issues.
Dean Nation? You? The brain boggles.
(since full disclosure is now the rage, I’m a guest writer at Dean Nation).
Is this one of those ironic jokes that I’ve been missing right and left recently? If not, how about some cites to your favorites posts?
I’m very glad to see this. Sullivan’s article addressed what I considered a big problem for the Democratic Party. In the midst of all the soul-searching and anguish about positioning and values and who knows what else, I felt the basic matter of political competency, or the lack thereof, was being overlooked.
The regulars that I saw and knew about – Shrum, McAuliffe, etc.- simply do not seem to know how to win a national election.
And yet, it seems to be working for the Republicans
False premise. The Clear Skies initiative was crafted via a whole series of compromises.
Dean Nation? You?
Yeah, me. I may have given Dean a whole raft of it when he was a contender, but he would’ve been a much better candidate than Kerry. He made some key blunders, but the Scream was distorted beyond all belief. Aziz, the guy who runs Dean Nation, is going for a purple state sort of theme.
I seem to remember a certain Dog, Bird who posted a certain doctored photograph …
On clear skies.
The environmental movement sometimes gets it very wrong. You know who’s even more likely to get it wrong? Liberalish writers who don’t know much about the legal or scientific background and who are trying to burnish their moderate, contrarian creds.
The problem is not emissions trading. I’m all for emissions trading. The problem is not new power plants. I’m all for new power plants. The problem is that repealing new source review for modifications under 20% makes it possible to keep the old coal powered dinosaurs in the midwest–the ones that release far more of every pollutant than any new plant, the ones putting the whole northeast out of compliance on ozone for pollution we did not cause, the ones destroying Smoky Mountain and Shenandoah National Park–burning indefinitely, decades after they were supposed to have shut down.
If they got Bob Shrum to retire that makes up for it, but I’m skeptical that it was Sullivan’s article per se & that there will a more general shakeup among political consultants.
You’re right. There was a certain Dog who did that, but the doctored photograph was changed to an undoctored version a day or two later, without any influence from the power that was. Just because I was harsh on the guy (and others afflicted with BDS in the post in question), doesn’t mean I didn’t like him. Dean had a much better position on Iraq than Kerry, which was that he opposed our going in but he stated that, since we were in, we needed to finish the job. That was a much more coherent approach than Kerry’s opportunistic flip floppery.
Actually, Kerry did not flip flop on the war. He should have. He should have said he was wrong to ever vote for it. Instead, he was too cautious, too afraid, too maddeningly consistent. His position was nuanced, opportunistic, splitting the difference, and he’d emphasize one half of it or the other depending on the audience or the circumstances–but one thing he did not do is flip flop. Believe me, I wanted him to for over a year, so I would’ve noticed it.
Also, Dean wasn’t dangerously unbalanced or suffering from “Bush Derangement Syndrome”. Nor was he in a spider hole of denial when he said that the capture of Saddam hadn’t made us safer. He was, unfortunately, quite correct.
Pay closer attention next campaign, will ya?
Boy, Chas, you are really warming the cockles of my heart. I have to ask, at what point is being harsh on a politician unfair? And what do you think of the media coverage of Dean? Was it unfair or simply harsh? How far can people who don’t like Bush (and I cop to the fact that I don’t like him. After 9-11, I hoped that he would pull a lincoln and surprise everyone with his vision, but I don’t believe that he has, despite interviews with Barbara Walters) go with being harsh? What constitutes fair criticism of the administration at this point in time?
Doh! the preview has Katherine saying
“suffering from “Bush Derangement Syndrome””
I thought BDS was Bird Dog Syndrome…
Getting back to the secondary point of your thread, I agree that environmental questions need some compromise, but if the administration continues to censor scientists, compromise is going to be pretty hard to come by
link
link
liberal j — citing an article by Bobby Kennedy Jr. as some sort of authority on Bush’s environmental record stretches the envelope. Did he take time off from picketing the Nantucket wind farm developers to write the article?
Kennedy’s still smarting from the shellacking he got from Bill O’Reilly over Bobby K’s frequent use of private jets. I generally can’t stomach O’Reilly, but he was in rare form that night — Kennedy was furious at not being taken for a serious greenie.
I say give Dean the DNC chairmanship and let him run with it. If it’s the wrong choice, no one will be in a position to do anything about it until it’s too late. And how could he do any worse than McAuliffe?
Thank you for dealing with the points made in that article and the other one so well and so directly, tomsyl. I look forward to your continued participation in this discussion and also for your tireless efforts to keep us informed about what O’Reilly is doing. Not being able to stomach him but still being able to keep up with his arguments is above and beyond the call of duty.
Pay closer attention next campaign, will ya?
I paid very close attention, thank you very much. The political calculus was this. Dean was leading the pack at the time of the $87 billion vote, and Clark had just entered the race, sucking away more potential votes from Kerry/Edwards. It is a fact that 95% of the convention delegates were anti Iraq War. Democratic caucus goers and primary voters were overwhelmingly anti Iraq War. In Kerry/Edwards’ view, the vote to authorize the Iraq War was a black mark for Democratic voters. Kerry/Edwards also knew that if they voted yea on the $87 billion, their fortunes would go the way of Lieberman and Gephardt, and they could kiss their chances of getting nominated goodbye. By voting no, they knew they could stay viable, making them just barely acceptable to the party faithful. Kerry knew that he would pay the consequences if he got nominated, but the first order of business was getting nominated. Sure, he had all kinds of reasons for voting no, but they were lame. His act was about as cynical and opportunistic as any.
The fact is that voting “no” was the hardline liberal vote. Kerry was outvoted 2-1 by members of his own party. Joe Biden, the author of the amendment to raise taxes to fund the $87 billion, ultimately voted yea when it came down to brass tacks. Kerry knew the bill would pass and that his no vote would have no effect on the final outcome. He could lodge his no vote safely and still please voting Democrats. He could have it both ways.
Voting no on the $87 billion is about as big of a flip flop as there could be, but in all fairness I mostly stopped calling Kerry a flip flopper, because his real weakness is that he kept trying to have it both or multiple ways, playing whatever side of an issue that worked to his best advantage. But you can’t run away from voting yes on the war and then voting no on funding it. That’s huge, and Kerry could never successfully rationalize it away. His “protest vote” sent the message that he would rather raise taxes than fund the War on Terror and the Iraq post-war, a classicly liberal and ultimately fatal position.
The far more coherent position was Dean’s. He took the principled stand of being against the Iraq War, but since the war happened anyway, the best course to take the steps to win it.
As for Dean being right about the world not being safer after Saddam was captured, it’s a hypothetical opinion. Who knows what the world would be like if Saddam were still at large. But what Dean said defied common sense. Any time a thug like Saddam or a terrorist like Osama is captured or killed, the world is better off.
Any time a thug like Saddam or a terrorist like Osama is captured or killed, the world is better off.
Only if all else remains equal, which in the real world it never does. This was my main complaint with the dominant argument for war — “Saddam is bad, therefore taking him out will be good”. Far too simplistic. There are certainly legitimate arguments to be made for the war, but that IMO isn’t one of them.
“Any time a thug like Saddam or a terrorist like Osama is captured or killed, the world is better off.
Only if all else remains equal, which in the real world it never does. This was my main complaint with the dominant argument for war — “Saddam is bad, therefore taking him out will be good”. Far too simplistic. There are certainly legitimate arguments to be made for the war, but that IMO isn’t one of them.”
This has little to do with Dean’s position so far as I can tell. The context of his comment was not a general critique of the Iraq war. It was a comment about capturing Saddam after the war, and all other things being the same as they actually played out, capturing Saddam was certainly good.
Oh, right, I’d forgotten the context. Yeah, that statement of his was a little too strong, although the capture of Saddam didn’t turn out to be as much of a positive as was being suggested at the time either.
You guys are mis-remembering again. Dean not only said that capturing a tyrant like Saddam was a good thing (duh), he actually said that Saddam’s capture made U.S. soldiers in Iraq safer and made Iraqi civilians safer, but did not make U.S. civilians safer from terrorist attack. He was rather clumsily trying to drive home the point that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.
He was over-optimistic, as it turns out. The insurgency’s gotten much, much, much worse since then. You could argue that if Hussein weren’t captured it would be even worse, but there’s no real evidence for that. I’m glad Hussein’s in jail, I hope and would guess Iraqis are living in less fear as a result, but he was hiding in a hole and apparently playing no real role in the insurgency–I’d be pleasantly surprised if his capture saved even one American soldier.
OK, having now mis-remembered twice in two successive comments, it would probably be best if I refrained from commenting in this thread anymore.
And I think Kerry should have voted for the $87 billion but that’s for political reasons. The idea that he wasn’t supporting the troops is f*****g ridiculous. With the power to declare war effectively removed and the President’s royalist view of his inherent power to set aside the laws, the funding power is practically the only way for Congress to have any effect at all on foreign policy decisions. It’s their only carrot and their only stick. So if they want the President to do something, the only way to actually make it happen is to vote yes provided the condition is met, AND VOTE NO IF IT ISN’T.
(Joe Biden is breathtaking in his ability not to understand this. He proposes wonderful bills, but he always, always, always caves in the end.)
Now, in this case. There is no way the war wouldn’t have been funded. If Congress passed a spending bill funding the spending with a partial repeal of the tax cuts, and refused to pass a spending bill funding the war by adding to deficit, Bush would have signed the tax cut repeal. The real problem was that the GOP Congress would never allow the tax cut repeal, andwould vote to add to the deficit. So Kerry’s vote was going to be meaningless and political and symbolic in either case. Either a symbolic vote to support the troops, which would benefit him in the general election, or a symbolic vote to oppose the way the President was screwing up both Iraq and the federal budget, which would benefit him in the primaries but hand the President an issue to demagogue in the months leading up to the general election.
As a Democrat, when given a choice like that–I always want the candidate to prioritize the general over the primaries. So Kerry was wrong to vote as he did, but if there had been a snowball’s chance in hell of actually getting the war paid for instead of charged to the country’s credit card, and of getting the President top actually answer Congress’ questions about how the money was being spent, he would have been completely right.
The reason Saddam was captured is because he had already been sold out and marginalized by the real guys in charge. No more friends, you see.
Didn’t Bush threaten to veto the original $87 billion, which was to be paid for with a tax increase? If so, why wasn’t he “flip-flopping?”
It’s OK to borrow $87 billion – that is, make future taxpayers foot the bill – but not to pay it ourselves? How does that make a bit of sense?
Anarch, two responses to the “not compromising” charge.
First, conservatives make up about 30+% of the country while liberals make up about 15%. Thus, liberals have to convince many more people to trust them. Clinton did it successfully, no one else really has.
Second, I think the administration was pretty big into compromises for quite awhile. Specifically, No Child Left Behind, Sarbanes-Oxley, McCain-Feingold, the Iraq War Resolution, and the first round of tax cuts all received major bipartisan support. Sarbanes-Oxley and McCain-Feingold were not traditional conservative or Republican issues, but the administration willingly compromised. The judicial filibustering and the primary season seemed to put us in the immovable right v. left setup we have now. Hopefully with the primaries far behind us, Democrats can stop the judicial filibustering and compromises can be found on Soc Sec reform, tax reform, and immigration proposals.