The Shrum Curse.(The Talk of the Town)(Robert Shrum)(Interview)

Robert Shrum, who was for three decades among the most prominent Democratic political consultants in the country, never mastered the exigencies of everyday life. He grew up in Los Angeles but does not drive; he is best known as a speechwriter but does not type. Since 2000, he has spent his summers at a house on Cape Cod, but his complexion seldom appears other than pasty or sunburned. Over the years, Shrum effectively turned himself into a machine for campaigning, and then, suddenly, after the 2004 election, he turned the machine off. "I thought it was time to move on," Shrum said the other day over lunch downtown. "I'd been doing it long enough."

There was also, of course, the matter of the "Shrum curse." In his last contest, Shrum served as the chief strategist for John Kerry, the eighth time he had worked for a Democratic Presidential candidate and his eighth loser. In lieu of a candidate, Shrum has this summer produced a memoir, "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner," a dishy recounting of his career. Page for page, notwithstanding the title, the book probably has more excuses than concessions, and there are revealing, and often unflattering, glimpses of his former clients: a foulmouthed Edmund Muskie, a dithering Bob Kerrey, and a lightweight John Edwards, among others. In all, though, Shrum, who is sixty-four years old, takes on the subject of the curse without actually acknowledging its existence.

"At a personal level, I don't believe in the 'Shrum curse,' " he said. "I had some influence and importance and a great vantage point, but the elections are always about the candidates, not the consultants." Still, confronting his first Presidential election in more than a generation as merely an interested outsider, Shrum shows that he has retained more than a few tics of the political trade. There is, for example, the criticism masquerading as praise, as when he says, "I happen to like Hillary Clinton." Shrum has had an uneasy relationship with the Clintons dating back to the McGovern campaign in 1972, on which both the future President and the consultant worked. "Bill is now the rock star of the Democratic Party, but he didn't get to be a great President," Shrum said. "He was reelected without asking for a mandate to do anything big, and he didn't get anything big done as ...