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Edited on Sat Nov-13-04 10:21 AM by fujiyama
That's all I can say. This guy has about the worst record we could find...Why do we keep using him? I had my worries about him from the begining. Wasn't he also with Gore and Mondale and other losing candidates? The party needs a house cleaning. Now wouldn't be a bad time. On Edit, I'd like to add a link to this article: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=%2FWAOQoLsGzQE5FcT6qGE0x%3D%3DMaybe later I'll clip some parts or start a thread. It's a very interesting article about how screwy things were inside the campaign. "The largest caucus of recriminators, one that spans ideological boundaries and includes critics from every corner of the party, argues that Kerry failed to offer a compelling message. As Kerry seemed to realize in his speech Saturday night, the no-message critique is congealing into conventional wisdom. I heard it in every conceivable permutation from almost everyone I interviewed. "I don't know that we ever knew what it was we were saying about George W. Bush," says one senior member of the team, whose job it was to come up with a message about Bush. It was a problem that plagued the campaign as soon as they stumbled, penniless, from the primaries into the general election. "When we got into the general, nobody knew how to go against Bush," says a senior campaign official. " Shrum and Mellman built this strategy against Bush, 'Stronger at home, respected in the world.' What does that mean? We never even had strategy memos." By the fall, things were no better. "If there was a clear message in September about why you elect Kerry and defeat Bush, most of the people in the campaign were unaware of it," says one senior strategist hired late in the campaign. "
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"Aides complain that the litany of issues filled the message vacuum. Inside the campaign, the message was known as jhos (pronounced "jay-hose"), which stood for jobs, health care, oil, and security. "jhos," says a senior policy adviser, despondently. "That was our message. It was jhos. That was literally our message. And, by the way, someone made millions of dollars to come up with that." That someone would be the political consulting firm Shrum, Devine, and Donilon, which is now receiving the brunt of criticism from demoralized staffers. The problem, aides say, is the lack of imagination Shrum and his colleagues exhibited. One common complaint is that they were slaves to polling data and used the research in a ridiculously literal way. Says a senior aide, "When you ask people, 'What is the most important issue?' and they say prescription drugs, say, 'Well, if we run on prescription drugs, we'll win.'" One aide repeatedly pressed Kerry to give a speech about welfare reform, since he had voted for Bill Clinton's bill in 1996. The idea was rebuffed because welfare didn't show up in polling as a key issue for voters. "It's never going to be the top issue," the aide complains. "If you call me on the phone, I'm not going to say that. But, if I hear you talk about welfare reform, it tells me something about your underlying character." There seemed to be an insurmountable gulf between the consultants, at their best running issue-based Senate campaigns, and the other staffers, who pressed for Kerry to explain the values he would bring to office rather than just his specific proposals. "Things became increasingly programmatic rather than values-based," says a senior adviser. "We were talking more and more about the specifics of our plan rather than the principles John Kerry would bring to bear in making those decisions."
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In addition to jhos, Shrum is also taking a beating for the decision not to attack Bush. The swing voters in the focus groups said they didn't want to see attack ads, so the campaign dutifully obeyed. "There was a belief within the campaign that you did not need, fundamentally, to raise these questions about Bush," says one of the architects of the campaign's strategy. "It was much more about John Kerry and filling in the picture on John Kerry and making him an acceptable alternative." One of Kerry's closest aides says, "I absolutely think the lack of negative campaigning killed us." Aides argue that the absence of a negative case against Bush led directly to the absence of a coherent message overall. "The whole strategy was based on polling," says one of Kerry's senior advisers. "Mark Mellman always focused on swing voters. You've got to start making the case for change, but we were never allowed to do that because it scared the swing voters."
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That's not enough for most Democrats. "Nobody should put Shrum, Devine, Donilon in charge of another presidential campaign," says a senior Kerry official. "There should be a three-strikes-and-you're-out rule, and there should definitely be a seven-strikes-and-you're-out rule." Says a senior Democratic strategist who worked on the campaign, "The one thing that Clinton didn't have, and the one thing that both Gore and Kerry had, was Bob Shrum." In the spring, when reporters wrote profiles of Shrum, they could expect an unsolicited phone call from his good friend and partner James Carville, who would rebut criticism of Shrum. By the fall, Carville himself was so angry at the way the Kerry campaign was being run, and Shrum was so hurt by Carville's criticisms, that the two men were barely speaking.
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It's that time again for Democrats. Kerry aides and party strategists have thrown themselves into their quadrennial post-campaign ritual of recriminations. Old scabs are being picked. Scores are being settled. Clintonites point fingers at the Kennedy wing. Longtime Kerry aides throw accusations of disloyalty at the Clintonites. Staffers from the Democratic National Committee lob bombs at staffers from the campaign. Policy wonks gripe about inept political consultants. Kerry aides who traveled on the campaign plane snipe at the aides who were based in Washington. Democrats, out of power and out of jobs, are doing what they do best: turning on one another.
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