Don't be so modest, Bob. You have an amazing power. Any presidential candidate who you either work for directly or declare to have won before Election Day is doomed to fail. That power that you are so reluctant to brag about is known far and wide within political circles as the "Shrum Curse." We saw the latest demonstration by Bob Shrum of that power on With All Due Respect on September 2 as chronicled by your humble correspondent who anticipated its effects in this Newsbusters article, WADR: Will Shrum Curse Doom Hillary's Campaign?:
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.
Well, from the very moment that those words left Shrum's mouth, the inevitable Hillary Clinton poll collapse began. Look at the stats. Her rapid poll decline began right then on September 2. The Shrum Curse. So powerful is it that I recognized its effect on the Hillary campaign right then:
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.
Bob Shrum continues to pontificate about this campaign season but he is either supremely modest or blithely unaware of the power of the Shrum Curse. On Thursday, Reuters quoted him on why Hillary has fallen so dramatically in the polls in the past couple of weeks...right from the moment he placed the Shrum Curse on her:
Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist who managed 2004 candidate John Kerry's unsuccessful campaign, said Clinton remained the favorite to win the White House, with demographic changes favoring her over Trump, who is heavily reliant on white voters.
What has hurt Clinton, Shrum said, is not the time taken off from the campaign trail but rather her decision to keep her diagnosis secret until forced to disclose it - which reinforced a perception among voters that she has a penchant for secrecy.
"Fairly or unfairly, what this was taken as was more evidence that she was not transparent and that’s what hurts her," Shrum said. "She been far more transparent than Trump but she hasn’t gotten any credit for it."
Yes, Bob, you can give this or that excuse for the reasons why Hillary's poll numbers collapsed but anyone who knows about the Shrum Curse knows that you were the cause the moment you doomed her by declaring Hillary to have already won.
The Shrum Curse. Perhaps just a silly superstition...and yet, eerily accurate and powerful. It never fails to doom.
