Want to know why the Democrats lost the election?

Two words: Bob Shrum.

I don’t want to say I told you so, but . . .

Well, I really do, because I really did – in a piece last spring entitled “The Shrum Factor.” Here’s an excerpt:

Still smarting from what they see as the 2000 theft of the White House, the Democrats are pinning their hopes on one man.

It’s not John Kerry.

The man of the hour, the man behind that man, is Bob Shrum. Kerry doesn’t make a media move without him. He doesn’t speak without consulting him – which is why some Democrats are quietly worried. It’s bad enough, they murmur, that Shrum is poisonous and divisive. What’s worse is the ‘Shrum curse:’ he was a key figure in four previous Democratic presidential campaigns. All lost.

I mention this again only in amazement and revulsion at the sheer temerity and unmitigated gall Shrum continues to display in the wake of having just blown an eminently winnable election.

(You know, the one where his candidate raised record amounts of money and outspent a well-funded rival, the one where the incumbent had some of the lowest approval ratings ever registered for a sitting president, who was waging an unpopular, unwinnable war, had driven the economy into a tail spin, given huge tax cuts to the richest one per cent of the population. and turned record budget surpluses into record deficits in record time.)

Witness ‘Kerry Advisers Point Fingers at Iraq and Social Issues,’ Adam Nagourney’s New York Times article of November 9, wherein Shrum incredibly explains the loss by blaming – get this – “the news” for Kerry’s loss. “News events were driving this, including the Osama bin Laden tape, at the end,” he told the Times. ”

I see . . . the news did it!

What neither Shrum nor Nagourney told you, however, is that Shrum was driving the entire Kerry campaign – and he drove it straight off a cliff! Allowing Shrum behind the wheel of Kerry’s media and message machinery – power-drunk and DUI (Driving UnIntelligently) – ensured Kerry’s defeat, particularly because Mark McKinnon, Shrum’s counterpart in the Bush campaign, spent months kicking his butt on a daily basis.

McKinnon, a high-school dropout, onetime staff songwriter for Kris Kristofferson, and friend of such liberal Democrat political operatives as Paul Begala and James Carville, was an unlikely choice to run George Bush’s campaign media. But politics is first and foremost about winning – and McKinnon’s candidates win, from Texas Democrats like Governor Ann Richards (1990) and Houston Mayor Bob Lanier (1991) to Republicans like George Bush (2000 and 2004.)

McKinnon and the Bush campaign left the Rose Garden to enter the fray months before this year’s election. Asked if it was risky to present the president as a partisan so early, McKinnon replied, “Absolutely not – the real risk is not engaging. We have a clear plan and we’re executing it. We want to pre-act, not re-act.”

And so they did, with a coordinated blitz of advertisements, speeches and sound bites aimed at positioning the president as a “steady” leader while at the same time defining John Kerry as “indecisive and lacking conviction,” a “flip-flopper” who changed positions often for political expediency.

Sound familiar?

To combat the unprecedented barrage of Republican attack ads, Kerry launched his own record-setting ad buy aimed at introducing himself to voters. But there was one problem: many felt they had already met Kerry, courtesy of McKinnon and his earlier $60 million blitzkrieg portraying the Democrat as a tax-raising flip-flopper who was soft on defense. Kerry never really recovered.

While Kerry’s response ads focused on his biography and service in Vietnam, they failed to repair the damage already inflicted, particularly in the battleground states. The Shrum-produced spots lacked the power of an earlier ad that made the crucial difference for Kerry in Iowa. That “Mythic Hero” spot, produced by ad wizard Jim Margolis, was a defining moment that pulled together the candidate’s biography, passion, and plans for his presidency in a way that no subsequent Kerry ad managed to do. It brought Kerry back from cadaver-like status to win Iowa and go on to capture the nomination.

But the ‘expert’ Bob Shrum forced Jim Margolis out in a dispute over money and power.

“Can Shrum repeat the Margolis miracle?” I wrote last spring, “Or will the Shrum curse kill Kerry’s chances?”

Spinmeister Shrum, of course, offers other explanations and other fall guys for the Dem defeat. Here’s another laugher from the aforementioned Nagourney article:

“Even as they sought to put much of the blame of Mr. Kerry’s loss on external events, Mr. Carville and Mr. Shrum acknowledged at least implicitly what had been a continuing criticism of Mr. Kerry, that he had never presented an overarching view of what his presidency might be like.”

The problem, according to the experts, was Kerry’s “narrative,” and his campaign’s lack of a clear, consistent and coherent message. “A narrative is the key to everything,” explained Kerry pollster Stanley Greenberg. “I think they had a much more coherent attack and narrative that motivated their voters.”

“We had a narrative,” Shrum protested. “But in the end, I don’t think it came through. . .”

Well, I have one question for Mr. Answer Man:

WHOSE FAULT IS THAT?

Could it have anything to do with Shrum? After all, he was Kerry’s undisputed maestro of the media and the message for Kerry. He and his colleagues Tad Devine and Michael Donilon crafted the message, noodled the narrative and spun the spots that inundated Florida and Ohio for months.

Sure, it’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, and hindsight is always 20/20 the day after a game – or an election. That’s why I offer again words originally written last May:

“After winning the internal scuffle with Margolis, Shrum’s firm is producing all of Kerry’s TV ads for a campaign some Dems fear is adrift. Informed political operatives and media observers alike see it in disarray and lacking a coherent theme, focus and message.”

And these:

“Shrum is the most influential of Kerry’s image-makers, the one who defines his candidacy. Which is why many insiders believe the election will be won – or lost – by the guy who isn’t running.”

And so it was. Yet Shrum – still so deep in denial he thinks it’s a river in Egypt –somehow remains a major player. Reminded that his candidate lost the election by 3.5 million votes, Shrum responded, “That’s not true. He lost by 60,000.”

Please, Democrats – whomever you nominate in 2008, promise only this: you won’t let Bob Shrum blow it again!