This election is over! You got that? Hillary Clinton has already won.
Only one not so little problem. The one making this declaration is none other than the Eddie Mush of politics aka Bob Shrum. This time the extremely unlucky political consultant (0 for 8 in presidential candidate wins) who is infamous for possessing the "Shrum curse" might have cast a pall of misfortune upon the Hillary Clinton campaign with his gloatingly confident prognostication of certain victory for her.
In fact, she has pretty much already won according to Shrum who was jubilantly performing an end zone victory dance while speaking to John Heilemann today on Bloomberg's With All Due Respect.
JOHN HEILEMANN: Traditionally in politics, Labor Day is the start of the general election. This summer has felt like the general election started a long time ago. So does Labor Day now mean anything?
BOB SHRUM: Yeah, I think it is the end of the election. I think we are going to look back and say that this period from the Republican convention, Democratic convention, the aftermath, the Trump tweets, the attacks, his ridiculous performance this week on immigration first in Mexico and then in Phoenix. I think we are going to look back on it and say that is when the election was decided. He didn't have much of a chance to begin with I don't think but this was a really fateful period.
HEILEMANN: Do you think the election is over basically?
SHRUM: I do.
The bad news for Hillary is that Shrum's curse has already been let loose into the ether. It is now too late to do what should have been done at least a year ago: exile Shrum to Fiji and place him under house arrest with no access to the outside world.
Think I am exaggerating? Well, even hardboiled reporters and analysts fully subscribe to the Shrum curse. One of those critics is Jeffrey Toobin who wrote a New Yorker article titled, The Shrum Curse.
...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.
His interaction with John Kerry produced an incident which forever sealed his Shrum curse reputation in the annals of political legend as you can see in this Newsweek account:
It was a little after 7 p.m. on election night 2004. The network exit polls showed John Kerry leading George Bush in both Florida and Ohio by three points. Kerry's aides were confident that the Democratic candidate would carry these key swings states; Bush had not broken 48 percent in Kerry's recent tracking polls. The aides were a little hesitant to interrupt Kerry as he was fielding satellite TV interviews in a last get-out-the-vote push. Still, the 7 o'clock exit polls were considered to be reasonably reliable. Time to tell the candidate the good news.
Kerry had slept only two hours the night before. He was sitting in a small hotel room at the Westin Copley (in a small irony of history, next door to the hotel where his grandfather, a boom-and-bust businessman, shot himself some 80 years ago). Bob Shrum, Kerry's friend and close adviser, couldn't resist the moment. "May I be the first to say 'Mr. President'?" said Shrum.
If Hillary plunges precipitously in the polls sometime soon, many pundits will blame the drip drip dripping of her many scandal revelations released to the public or the positive reception to Donald Trump's immigration policy but I think we know what the real culprit will be: the Shrum curse. It is as real as the Eddie Mush jinx. In fact, in the movie A Bronx Tale, the very unlucky real life Eddie Mush played himself. Here is the scene where the wise guys bet on the horse Kryptonite to win but the moment Eddie Mush announced he bet on it too, they all tore up their tickets despite the horse still being way in the lead. They knew all too well the Eddie Mush jinx...as inevitable as the Shrum curse.
