This seems especially inexplicable seeing as Dems would have been emulating the practices of the party actually winning elections, instead of holding on to the past practices of losing campaigns. How Mr. Shrum et alii continue to make a living is quite beyond my understanding.

Word.

How can I get into that business. Those guys are pretty mediocre strategist. And the pay is great.

the obscene amounts of money being shovelled to these useless assholes is disgusting. and if it's not bad enough that they stuff their bank accounts and still lose, shrum gets a choice spot at nyu to instruct the next generation of connected political operatives how to lose while getting rich.

It's about time. Republican candidates have been running presidential campaigns this way for years; it's absurd that it's taken Dems so long to catch up.

That's easy-- the Dems were afraid to confront their consultants. They probably approached them submissively and, in a high, whiney voice, sounding like Tom Daschle or Harry Reid, said "We wouldn't want to tie our consultants' hands during these difficult times."

I wonder what consultants sold this idea to the various candidates.

I also wander what they charged for it.

Thank goodness. Took long enough, but I'm now definitely feeling even better about '08.

Did I tell the name of the game, boy. It's called riding the gravy train.

Owing to the quirks of campaign finance laws, paying consultants is slightly more complicated than people realize.

The quirk is this: Consultants may not write off bad debt owed them by losing campaigns. The law treats that write-off as a political contribution, quite possibly an illegal contribution.

This puts consultants in the position of urging candidates to spend more and more in hopes that a come-from behind victory will mean that they will be paid what they are owed.

And yes, the payday may be bigger because of all the last-minute ads and polls and GOTV efforts.

I wonder how much of what Dems paid for consulting was the consultant agreeing to do work that he might never get paid for unless their guy won?

And are the reported amounts for politcal consulting the actual amount paid or simply the amount the campaigns owe their consultants? (which might never have get paid)

You mentioned Amy Sullivan just to drive up traffic, right?

Exactly. Nothing gets me posting more than observations about how Democrats need to be more like evangelical Republicans and lousy basketball analysis.

We could go over 1 billion dollars this year just to elect a bunch of dumbasses to office.What is wrong with this picture.

How does Shrum get any print time without it being noted that he is a serial loser of presidential campaigns? If you were going to design a theoretical model of how to run a presidential media campaign wouldn't you just take Shrum's advice and do exactly the opposite?

The trouble is the evil distorting effect of television. Someone needs to create a graph with the Y axis as the quantity of evil with respect to the X axis as time (t) that television has existed. Methinks that the quantity of evil (Q) has increased in an exponential manner since 1964.