How was Bob Shrum chosen to be chief strategist for

[Eric J in MN]

Kerry-Edwards, having previously been involved in 7 losing Presidential elections and 0 winning ones?

Shouldn't that have been a warning sign?

[Eric J in MN]

1. kick

kick

[THUNDER HANDS]

2. friends with Kerry

they go way back, I believe

[Eric J in MN]

3. Thanks. I hope in the future,

friendship is kept out of choosing a chief campaign strategist.

Let's choose someone who helped Bill Clinton win.

Or let's choose Bill Clinton to the chief campaign strategist.

[Julien Sorel]

4. Since all the primary candidates wanted Shrum...

I assume he has something going for him. We don't know everything that goes on, and the bits and pieces we get from the media aren't enough to make informed decisions on. But before everyone announced, there was a "Shrum primary," and Kerry won it -- won Shrum's services.

If you look at Shrum's message, it is identical to what all the serious candidates ran on. People here are attacking Shrum over the Swift Boats thing, but there is no evidence that anything the Kerry camp did would have affected that bullshit one way or another -- it's some of the ex post thinking that people on message boards have the luxury of indulging in.

In my opinion, the atmosphere among the media was such that, had Kerry immediately responded, the media would have trumped the charges up anyway, then blamed Kerry for making a big deal out of nonsense. As it was, the Swift Boat nonsense continued to rage until the RNC convention gave the media something else to pay attention to; nothing Kerry did or didn't do had any affect on the whole affair.