Robert Shrum
has been a senior adviser to the Gore 2000 presidential campaign, the campaign of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and the British Labour Party. In addition to being the chief strategist for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign, Shrum has advised thirty winning U.S. Senate campaigns; eight winning campaigns for governor; mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities; and the Democratic Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Shrum's writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, and other publications. The author of No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner (Simon and Schuster), he is currently a Senior Fellow at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service.
RECENT COLUMNS
By the middle of next month, the die will be cast on the economy, health-care reform and Afghanistan. These are the tests that will decide Obama's presidency.
Republicans took a joyful victory lap last week for next year's 2010 midterm elections. Now all they have to do is run the race.
Mired in anger and vituperation, seemingly hell-bent on becoming a small-tent faction rather than a big-tent governing party, Republicans have betrayed the leader they ritually canonize. The GOP is now the party of malaise.
One Democratic candidate has distanced himself from his party's and his president's signature issue. Another has embraced it. Who's better off?
The last of Barack Obama's 2008 debates with John McCain previewed the kind of president he has become. It also painted a vividly distinct portrait of the current GOP.
Despite the false hopes of Republicans, Obama will prevail on health care and preside over a growing economy. The fateful test is Afghanistan.
Republicans have concluded that by opposing everything, they can end up winning in 2010 and 2012. But can a party with no platform succeed?
Later this fall, President Obama will sign into law a landmark health-reform bill. Then the hard part begins.
Things may look bleak for President Obama in the first week of September. They'll look a lot different a few months from now.
The Op-Ed page of The New York Times published two columns on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on the same day. From Paul Krugman on the Left, and Ross Douthat on the Right, we got two fistfuls of error.
The press, Republicans, and frustrated progressives think Obama is struggling and his health plan "on the precipice of defeat." That just proves that those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat their own mistakes.
In their effort to destroy health-care reform in the U.S., conservatives have been heaping lies upon government-run health care in the U.K. Britons would never surrender their National Health System. Once Democrats pass reform here, Americans won't retreat either.
Republicans seem to be enjoying their August delirium and perhaps they should. For them, it only gets worse from here as the economy improves and Democrats ride growth—and their enactment of health-care reform—into the midterm elections.
The stakes are high and Republicans are stooping low. But if health reform falters as a result of GOP demagoguery, Democrats may face a reconstituted Gingrich coalition in 2010.
Rubert Murdoch, Matt Drudge, and their followers sought to use the Gates imbroglio as a racial rallying cry against Obama. With health-care reform on the line, defusing the hysteria was worth a beer.
She pulls at the heartstrings of the Republican base, but in addition to all the peculiar problems of her own design, Sarah Palin has one obstacle she cannot overcome: Republicans like to choose the next in line—and she isn't.
The Republican Party, in a time of imminent irrelevance, pounced on the 9.5 percent jobless number, hoping to benefit. Bad move.
In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan counseled our ever-ambitious President to focus on leaving a legacy that can be reduced to one sentence—a specious notion borrowed from former Republican Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. Luckily, Obama knows greatness doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.
On health-care reform, the president must move quickly to secure victory. He doesn't have as much time as he thinks on gay rights, either.
The defeat of former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor's race has been called the end of the Clinton era. But for which Clinton?
