Bob Shrum

Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist and frequent guest on Meet the Press, said he thinks that Tim Russert was "the greatest political interviewer of our time and maybe all time."

"He held people to account. Politicians love to change their views depending on circumstances -- they are only human -- and there was Tim with a quote from six months ago, a year ago, five years ago, to put it up on the screen and say, 'Well, how do you explain your position today, when you said this five years ago?'

"The other thing he did was he reinvented the Sunday talk show. The Sunday talk show could have died. He gave it new life and drama and people really cared about it. And at a human level, he was just a terrific person. He knew my father was sick, he sent him an audio book with an autograph. Of course he wouldn't open it because he didn't want to ruin the autograph. I told Tim and he said, 'I owe you another audio book.' But I find the whole thing unbelievable. I'm supposed to be taping a show with him next Thursday and I'm talking to you about him in the past tense.

"The other thing is that he was a progressive Democrat, he never made any secret about that, but he was totally fair. You could get people on both sides of the aisle to say that. Tough. He could be very tough. But he said what he thought. So on the night of Indiana and North Carolina he looked in to the camera and said we now know who the Democratic nominee for president is going to be, and he was right. Some people criticized him for that, but it was the truth."

For the love of God, please stop enabling them.  read more »

For the record, it isn’t until the fourth page of the introduction to his new memoir, No Excuses, that Robert Shrum begins making excuses.On the subject of the “Shrum Curse”—a reference to his zero-for-eight record in White House contests—the now-retired consultant pleads that the first seven strikes against him don’t really count.  read more »

Bob Shrum, for one, thinks that Hillary Clinton's campaign made a potentially damaging tactical error by going after Barack Obama yesterday.

"I understand the Clinton mantra is 'attack,' but attack attack attack doesn't always work, as the people in the charge of the Light Brigade found out," said Shrum in a phone interview from Los Angeles. "In this case it seems that they gave the story much greater visibility -- it would have been a one-cycle story."

He was referring to Howard Wolfson's response yesterday to Obama supporter David Geffen's comments about the Clintons -- "Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it's troubling" -- in a Maureen Dowd column Wednesday.

The result was a remarkably sharp exchange between Obama's communications director Robert Gibbs and Wolfson, who argued that the Obama campaign had embraced "slash & burn politics."

The whole thing seemed to be the perfect embodiment of the Democrats' new we'll-never-get-Swift-Boated-again-offense-as-best-defense philosophy. But Shrum (who advised John Kerry in 2004) thinks the Clinton response may have made the potential damage worse.

"I think they took this from being a 12-hour cycle to it being a 48-hour and 72-hour story, and maybe an ongoing story. If you think that the headline of the story is that 'Obama is a bad negative person,' which I think is a hard sell, frankly, then I suppose you could argue for it."

Today's Daily News headline, if it's any indication, read "It gets Ugly Early as Hil Slams Bam." The New York Times wrote about a "the sensitivity in the Clinton camp to Mr. Obama's rapid rise as a rival and his positioning as a fresh face unburdened by the baggage borne by Mrs. Clinton."

Shrum speculated about what the motive was. "Maybe the Clinton campaign feels it has to mow Obama down before the primaries," he said, "but they could end up shooting themselves in the foot. I mean, the John Edwards campaign could have planned this whole thing."

But he foresaw unintended consequences.

"They clearly think every attack must be instantly replied to. And I think that can be a big mistake. They had a very successful campaign launch, her image had some of the hard edges taken off, and they've all now been put back."

--Jason Horowitz

I caught up with Bob Shrum after that panel appearance at NYU the other night and asked him about the possibility of a successful presidential bid by Mayor Bloomberg in 2008.

Here's what he said:

"No chance. No. He can't win the presidency as an independent."

You can hear more from Shrum on Bloomberg, John McCain and '08, here.

-- Azi Paybarah

Do the Republicans really want to run against Hillary Clinton in 2008?

Bob Shrum thinks not. Here's what he told an audience of NYU graduate school students at a panel discussion last night:

"By the way, the Republican Party will do everything they can, if they want to run against her like they say they do, not to damage her between now and the time the nominating process begins."

Republican consultant and fellow panelist Kieran Mahoney, whose business partner is working on John McCain's campaign, still says the GOP would welcome her with open arms.

"Hillary Clinton's perceived ideology is more liberal than Mario Cuomo's, more liberal than Bella Abzug's in statewide surveys," he said. "I just think you can't sell that you can sell that in Ohio. I don't think I can sell that in Ohio."

Shrum's response:

"You've just seen a preview of the McCain candidacy played out in the course of a couple hours. 'I'm a centrist. I'm in the mainstream. Hillary's extreme. Vote for me.'"

-- Azi Paybarah

I report that Bob Shrum is writing a memoir.

Jason Horowitz takes a look at whether Mike is building on Rudy's welfare policy moves -- or rolling them back. (City Limits also broke a bit of news in this area this week in a piece on toughening state rules.)

Matt Schuerman writes that Larry Silverstein isn't playing well with others on the West Side.

E.J. Kessler has a column on Tom Suozzi's charm.  read more »

And Tom Scocca writes an open letter to Arthur Sulzberger.

Last night, Politicker editor Marcus Baram sent over this preview of today's Observer, which includes the names Rove, Shrum, Clinton, and Summers:

Here's the lineup:

- Matt Scheurman examines the fight over the West Side Yards in light of Monday's deadline for competing bids from the Jets, Cablevision and TransGas. "It's a dog and pony show without the dog or the pony," quipped one reporter.

- Our cover story this week delves into the Summers saga. Now that Larry Summers has been spanked by the Harvard faculty, is he toast? Sources tell Tom Scocca that Summers has been angling to hire a prominent female scholar, Harvard-trained psychologist Carol Gilligan, now at New York University, who professionally theorizes about innate gender differences, to damp down the drama.

- Now that Dan Rather, along with that Texas twang, has given up his seat at the anchor desk, will CBS kiss and make up with the White House? "Karl Rove started talking to me again," John Roberts tells our ace TV columnist Joe Hagan. "With the departure of Dan Rather, this is a good opportunity for CBS to reach out," said Ari Fleischer, the former White House press spokesman. "This is almost a curtains-up for CBS to improve relationships."

- I take a look at why it's taking so long for the MTA to follow through on their security plan after it was revealed that they've only spent a portion of the $591 million budgeted two years ago. That got me thinking about security spending by other big-city transit agencies around the country (most of them, such as DC Metro which exhausted their $49 million in federal dollars, have spent every penny), the huge disparity between Homeland Security funding for airline security ($15 billion) and transit security ($115 million), and how much can really be done to secure a system as extensive and complex as the MTA.

- Adam Begley profiles English novelist Ian McEwan, whose new book "September" is causing a stir on both sides of the Atlantic. "It's a coronation," say his friend, Timothy Garton Ash. "It's now an accepted cultural fact that Ian is the leading English novelist of his generation."

- Our editorials: Can General Motors Survive?, New Yorker Wins Intel Prize, Bobby Short

- Jake Brooks looks at "Our Brand is Crisis," a new documentary recounting James Carville and Bob Shrum's work on behalf of Bolivian presidential candidate Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, aka Gon. Call it The War Room's South American Sequel.

- Joe Conason's latest column: "Shameless Right-Wingers Exploiting Terri Schiavo"  read more »

- Sheelah Kolhatkar profiles Philip Gourevitch, the new editor of the Paris Review, along with some juicy literary gossip. When writer Rick Moody found out about the firing of previous editor Brigid Hughes, he fired off an angry "resignation" letter to the magazine.

- And Rebecca Dana has an amusing take on Hillary Clinton's visit to the First Ladies exhibit at the New York Historical Society on Monday.

Two veteran Democratic political consultants who tried and failed to unseat President Bush are getti  read more »

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Only a few weeks ago, the nation's top media consultantswere convinced that there would be no Democr  read more »