INTERVIEW
AN INTERVIEW WITH
Bob Shrum
Bob Shrum, a 1965 graduate of Georgetown College, served as a speechwriter and campaign advisor to Democratic candidates for nearly 40 years. He is the author of No Excuses: Confessions of a Serial Campaigner and wrote Ted Kennedy’s famous address at the 1980 Democratic convention. Shrum now contributes a column to The Week and teaches at New York University. Interview conducted and transcribed by Eric Pilch. What stands out about your time at Georgetown as an undergraduate?
I spent a large portion of the four years involved in intercollegiate debate and was named the top debater in the country my senior year. It was in many ways the most powerful part of my education and had a big impact on my life ever since. [The University] was a smaller place than it is now, and it was a wonderful place to grow and to learn. It was more a college than a university at that time. The emphasis, I think, for most of the faculty, though not all of it, was more on teaching than on research, and I think I got an extraordinary education. In those days, the Philodemic Society both sponsored the intercollegiate debate team and conducted weekly debates. I was a constant participant in those weekly debates, and we were constantly debating public policy, the Kennedy Administration, politics.
The Philodemic Society is a very conservative group now.
I was asked to judge the American Medal Debate—I won the American Medal when I was in college—several years ago, and the topic was “Resolved: the ancients were superior to the moderns.” And I thought it was absurd. To me it wasn’t a serious debate about serious issues. I probably wouldn’t be very involved in today’s Philodemic as its presently constituted, but I would be involved in intercollegiate debate. We debated whether or not the compromise that president Kennedy had negotiated with the communists through Averill Harriman that neutralized Laos was the right policy or not. We debated civil rights. We debated the great issues that pressed in on upon that time and that were very much alive and on campus. Georgetown was, when I was there, a relatively conservative campus. But it was a stimulating, interesting environment, and you felt constantly close to what was happening because of the city you were in.
How would you diagnose the 2010 midterms for the Democrats? Did you see the outcome as inevitable?
I think the midterms were, more than anything else, a referendum on the economy. They were a rerun of what happened to Ronald Reagan at the other end of the ideological spectrum in 1982. People were frustrated with the level of unemployment and the apparent slowness of the recovery, and Democrats paid the price. We could have saved more seats if we had a message that went beyond just asking people whether they wanted to go forward or back, which seemed contentless and not very motivating. Frankly, a lot of people, when asked if they wanted to go back, didn’t necessarily want to go back to Bush. But they would have liked to go back to full employment, their house being worth more, their 401k being substantial and
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whole. So I think that was the wrong question. We should have fundamentally posed a question about who was going to fight for the interests of ordinary working people in this country and who was going to fight for the elites.
Given your experience as a consultant, how would you rate the administration’s messaging and tactics thus far?
Well first, I’m not a consultant anymore. Now I teach at NYU, and I commentate and write about this stuff. I’m a big defender of the President. I think he’s achieved more legislatively than any progressive president in 50 years. The much-derided stimulus I think undoubtedly kept the country and the world from plunging into a second Great Depression. The mess [Obama] inherited from Bush was even worse than anyone thought at the beginning, so it’s taken longer to turn around. I have real disagreements with some of my progressive friends who believe he should have held out on a public options in the health care bill at all costs. The cost of that would have been no health care bill. The financial reform bill could have had some provisions that were stronger. I think Chris Dodd and Barney Frank who are decidedly progressive and people I admire did the very best job they could getting a bill that could pass through Congress working with the President. If you look at the sweep of what was done, it’s really considerable. Now we’re going to have a great battle because the Republicans want to undo as much of this as they can. I think they’re probably not opposed to closing down the federal government to try to get their way. They’re testing the waters now to see if they can come up with some explanation that blames the President for closing down the federal government. If they think they can pull it off, then I think they would actually dare the move. On the debt limit, you have these people from the Tea Party. And, actually, I think at the Tea Party meetings they must smoke something, because they actually believe that you could refuse to raise the federal debt limit and that would be a viable policy. Refusing to raise the federal debt limit, which Ronald Reagan did regularly by the way, would throw the full faith and credit of the government into doubt, probably cause a huge panic in financial markets, affect the value of everyone’s home and make ordinary financial transactions very difficult. It would be an insane policy. But you have people who want to do it.
Do you see the administration getting anywhere with the new Congress?
Look, the President has done the right thing in saying, “I’m ready to work with the Republicans.” Do they, for example, want to work on entitlements? The President has said he’s prepared to work with them on reforming corporate tax rates. So you could do that in return for closing
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Photo used under Creative Commons from kenudigit
BOB SHRUM is enjoying retirement after 40 year career running campaigns for Democratic candidates.
loopholes and get a lower corporate tax rate. I think all those things are smart. Will they work? I don’t know, and I doubt it. But, on the other hand, there are a lot of people who doubted the president could ever pull off the deal he pulled off in December. Now Republicans are going to try to defund the federal government to the greatest extent possible. I’m cynical enough to think that they would actually welcome an economic stagnation or new downturn as a route to victory in 2012. There’s probably going to be, at some point, a very big battle.
You worked for Senator Ted Kennedy for years, including in 1980. Obviously President Reagan won the 1980 election, arguably shifting the perception of politics in this country. Given your vantage point as a former strategist, do you see any hope of a revitalized liberalism in the vein of Kennedy?
I certainly do but it depends on the course of the next two years. At this point in the Reagan administration, David Broder wrote a column writing off Reagan. He said, this is a failed presidency and we’ll think of it as kind of a 1.5 year period when Reaganism was tried and found wanting. Then the economy revived, and Reagan was reelected and he inaugurated a new conservative era. Obama was criticized for saying this during the campaign—I don’t know if you remember —that Reagan was a transformative president. Hillary Clinton tried to turn that into Obama saying he agreed with Reagan’s policies. That obviously wasn’t what he was saying, but it was true. So I think a lot of this depends on events, and I think there is a real chance, if the economy turns around and Obama is vindicated, that you will see a more progressive moment in America.
Do you have any desire to get back into the campaign world, or have you left that behind forever?
I think forty years was enough. It wasn’t quite forty years, but it was almost forty years, and I probably did it as long or longer than anybody else. It was a powerfully rewarding life in which I got paid for doing what I loved and what I deeply cared about. I can’t imagine a more ideal occupation than that. So I’m very happy with it. But I really enjoy teaching and I enjoy writing, so I’m retired, period.
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