That Wacky, Wacky Bob Shrum Posted by Michael Cohen

Consider this my requisite political posting of the week, but I had to comment on this doozy from Bob Shrum today on MSNBC. When asked about problems in the Clinton campaign, Shrum said that top Clinton strategist, Mark Penn has a thin campaign track record, having only worked on President Clinton's 1996 campaign and in his words, "that wasn't exactly tough."

Yeah, but you know what Mark Penn won that campaign. How many presidential campaign has Bob Shrum won?

But more to the point, it's patently untrue to suggest that Clinton's 1996 campaign was an easy race. Indeed, Penn and his partner Doug Schoen were brought on board in the winter of 1994/1995, which wasn't exactly a good time for the Democratic Party. Over the next year, they (along with Dick Morris) brilliantly repositioned President Clinton as a centrist Democrat (with some help from Newt Gingrich).

Among some of the smart, strategic moves of that campaign were ads run by the DNC in swing states that extolled the President's record on crime; calling for a balanced budget in the Spring of 1995, which blunted GOP attacks on the White House (and were stridently opposed by Harold Ickes and others in the White house); focusing the government shutdown on GOP efforts to cut Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment and changing the national debate from GOP-friendly family values to one of public values (a move that I believe was Penn's creation).

The reason why the 1996 race was so easy was because Clinton and the people around him did such a good job in 1995 of changing the public perception of him from a big government liberal, to a true centrist Democrat. After the 1994 debacle, that wasn't an easy thing.

What's more, you know what should have been an easy campaign - Al Gore's 2000 run for the White House.  Let's ask Bob Shrum how that one worked out.

Now I'm not going to defend Penn's track record on the 2008 campaign, but Bob Shrum has zero right to be criticizing any Democrat when it comes to running an effective presidential campaign.

Comments

[Peace]

Marc Penn and his centrist message has been terrible for the Democratic party. The passage of NAFTA by Bill Clinton and other free trade policies has turned working class voters against the Democratic party and has made them switched to the Republicans, whose platform of moral values, appealed to them. Morever Penn did a horrible job in 1996 because the margin that Clinton won by should have been greater due to his popularity rating, the Ross Perot factor, and having Bob Dole as his opponent. Marc Penn has contibuted grave errors to Hillary Clintons campaign by only concentrating on the big states while ignoring the small states. This allowed the Obama campaign to organize in these small states and take them away from Clinton. The main problem with Marc Penn is that he does not understand that red states have a very sizable population in the urban areas that could be used not only for Obama's advantage but also for the Democratic Party as well.

[dolphy]

Bingo, Michael. I've never understood why anyone listens to (much less hires) Bob Shrum.

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