With friends like Bob Shrum ...

He's 0-8 and sitting out 2008, but that doesn't mean he can't hurt the candidates anyway.

Published May 23, 2007 6:13PM (EDT)

If the Democratic Party can't do enough to kill itself, Bob Shrum is always available to stick the knife in just a little farther. Having gone 0-8 as a presidential campaign consultant, Shrum seems to be doing his part to make sure that no Democrat wins the White House in 2008.

In an excerpt from his new book leaked back in March, Shrum said that John Kerry didn't choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate in 2004 because polling revealed that her "high negatives" would hurt the ticket, and that John Edwards voted to authorize George W. Bush to use force in Iraq because he needed to shore up his own foreign policy credentials.

Now we can read more of what Shrum has to say about the former North Carolina senator: among other things, that Edwards -- for whom Shrum once worked -- is a lightweight, a "Clinton who hadn't read the books," and that Kerry "wished that he'd never picked" him as his vice-presidential candidate.

Predictably, the Republican National Committee is already distributing Shrum's comments as a dig on Edwards.


By Tim Grieve

Tim Grieve is a senior writer and the author of Salon's War Room blog.

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