Transcript of M.E. Sprengelmeyer's interview with Bob Shrum

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Published August 14, 2008 at midnight

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NEW YORK CITY 1980

* Nominee: Jimmy Carter

* Summary: Sen. Ted Kennedy pushes his uphill fight for the nomination all the way to the start of the convention.

* Lessons: Lingering bitterness from hard-fought primaries — and not even a semblance of convention unity — helped doom the Democrats in the fall.

ADVICE

“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Sen. Ted Kennedy to his crestfallen supporters, 1980

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Interview with Democratic consultant and speechwriter Bob Shrum by M.E. Sprengelmeyer of the Rocky Mountain News, on June 25, 2008, at Scripps Howard News Service offices in Washington.

QUESTION: Can you just say your name for me?

SHRUM: Robert Shrum.

Q: Well, I'm going to ask you a question that I'm going to ask you again at the end. I like to ask it first. What kind of lessons, specific questions, can we draw from the 1980 campaign and the 1980 convention that Democrats should remember going into Denver in 2008?

SHRUM: Well, they've already remembered one of them, which is the power of hope. What I think elicited such an incredible response to the Kennedy speech was that it was an embodiment, an expression of hope, an affirmation that the Democratic Party actually did have a mission and a vision for where the country should go. And that's why I think people responded so strongly to Barack Obama this year.

Secondly, I think we ought to understand we're going to get two or three moments at the convention where the country really is going to look in, in a concentrated way. And they're going to make a difference. And all the rest of it is just a sideshow. I mean the platform debate that went on before Kennedy ever got up to speak, no one remembers a single word of it. My guess is this year the big moments at the convention will be Obama, obviously, when he gives his acceptance speech, the vice presidential nominee if he does well. Anything related to Sen. Kennedy, Sen. Edward Kennedy, will have a powerful resonance with people, whether he comes or not. I have no idea what the plan there is, and I don't know if there is a plan at this point. But there will be those moments. I also think the country will look in on Michelle Obama.

One big difference between 1980 and now, is people really want to get a sense of the spouses, so Teresa Heinz speaking, Laura Bush having her moment in the sun, Cindy McCain's out campaigning today on her own. So that will be another moment.

Q: I want to get to some other moments from that 1980 convention. But first, how did you get involved? When did you first get on board in 1980 with Ted Kennedy? What was it that drew you in?

SHRUM: I'm part of the Kennedy generation. I'm, you know, when I was young, I always loved politics, but I always thought it was mostly old men, people my age now or even younger. And John Kennedy came along and created the sense of idealism and activism and a call to involvement that was very powerful. And it wasn't just me, it was an awful lot of people.

If you look at the '72 campaign, where I was McGovern's speechwriter, we were a children's crusade. I mean, Gary Hart was, I don't know, 32 years old or something, 31 years old. (Patrick) Caddell was 21 or 22. I was 27 or 28. I mean, we were all very, very young, but we were all inspired into public service in one way or another by John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and by that whole Kennedy tradition.

So I, in 1980, thought Carter was going to lose and didn't have a very good sense of where to take the country. I think he has been an excellent ex-president. I just wish he could have skipped the intermediate step. There's this line in my book that I quote from Tacitus: "All would have thought him fit to rule if he never had." And I thought he was going to lose in any event. I also thought that the country and the Democratic Party and progressivism needed a sense of renewal, and Sen. Kennedy seemed to offer that. And a few days before he announced, a couple weeks before he announced, my friend, Dick Goodwin said to me, "I think you ought to go work for Teddy." I said, "Great. How do I do that?" Dick said, "I'm going down for a meeting. You'll go to work for him."

Q: That's kind of a divisive period in the party itself, to have a serious, serious challenge in the early stages of those primaries to a sitting president in the party. Was it simply that? That you thought he was destined to lose?

SHRUM: Well, he was destined to lose and there were huge differences of principle and ideology and politics. I mean, it's interesting in both 1976 and 1980, in the two different parties we had a challenge to an incumbent president. In both cases, there were big arguments at stake. (In 1976,) Ronald Reagan was against the Panama Canal Treaty, he was against detente with the Soviet Union, he wanted massive budget cuts and massive tax cuts. Gerald Ford was on the other side of all those issues. In 1980, there was a very large dispute about national health insurance and what to do about it - a dispute, by the way, we still haven't resolved today. There (were) very, very big differences about foreign policy and about how to react, for example, to the invasion of Afghanistan. There was a recession that had taken hold in the midst of a "stagflated" economy. Kennedy was out there presenting a very activist program. And Carter was saying this will all ultimately sort of take care of itself. So there were some really, really big differences.

Contrast that with this year, and the reason, aside from the fact that I believe Sen. Clinton really cares about the Democratic Party and wants us to win. The reason that I think Sen. Clinton could not or would not go to the convention (with a challenge) is there were no great differences of principle and policy between her and Sen. Obama.

Q: There wasn't the Afghanistan conflict, there wasn't the hostage crisis, there wasn't . . .?

SHRUM: No. There was the individual mandate on health care. Nobody is going to say, "I carry to this convention my great cause of an individual mandate on health care." No one would know what you were talking about.

Q: One thing you do have, though, that's similar, is that you heard quite a bit during the campaign - especially as Sen. Obama took a lead and kept going - you started hearing the Clinton folks saying something that's throughout your book, which is that thought that the ultimate nominee might not be able to win. "He's destined to lose in the fall." We heard that again and again those last six weeks.

SHRUM: The difficulty was there was very little evidence for what the Clinton people were saying. And of course, as we've seen since the nomination was settled, there's no evidence for it at all. Obama right now, depending on which poll you believe, is running somewhere between 6 . . . And I don't think Newsweek is right that it's 15 points ahead, but he's running ahead. I think the whole objective lay of the land actually works for the Democratic Party this year. It worked against an incumbent Democratic president in 1980. It was very hard to go to the country in 1980 and say, "We have inflation, interest rates at 17-18-19 percent, a recession, hostages in Iran, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, draft registration, and by the way, re-elect me."

It was a perfect opening for Ronald Reagan to say, "Our best days are still ahead of us," which was a very powerful message.

So I never, it's funny . . . I don't think the electorate ever believed that either. Look at Pennsylvania. Everybody said, "Oh, Hillary won big in Pennsylvania. Obama's going to be in huge trouble in Pennsylvania." As of today he's about 12 points ahead in Pennsylvania.

Q: So when you went through that 1980 race, after the loss in Iowa, after some of the other losses, there seemed to be several moments when either you or the campaign was considering or even drafting versions of a concession speech. Can you talk about any of those moments when you thought you might concede? And why didn't you concede?

SHRUM: There were really two points. There were some people who thought that maybe we should, or Sen. Kennedy should, concede and leave after Iowa. He never did. We took a vote in the room actually after a discussion and the vote was four to four. And he said, the vote is 4-4 and I'm staying in. I think in part that was because we had run a very cautious, careful, calibrated campaign. He started out so far ahead before the hostages were taken. It was a campaign designed to offend no one . . . Campaigns designed to offend no one persuade no one. And with the hostages, we got into a lot of trouble, we lost the Iowa caucuses 2-1. I think Sen. Kennedy wanted to go out there – I know Sen. Kennedy wanted to go out there and say what he really thought. And really go out and fight on the issues he really cared about. So that's what we did.

Now, there's a certain point at which you can't go on if you can't win. And headed into the New York primary we had taken a real series of spankings. And it was the height of the Carter administration saying to voters, "You have to vote for Carter to send a message to the Ayatollah that we all stand together to release the 52 American diplomats who have been taken hostage." And on the day of the New York primary, Steve Smith, Sen. Kennedy's brother-in-law and campaign chairman called me and said, "Come over to the office." We were in New York. And he said, "Let's just write out a draft of a withdrawal speech so we have it." Lou Harris showed us 20 points behind. Nobody thought we could win Connecticut. So I wrote it and actually some of what I wrote later appeared in the convention speech. So I wrote it and I was so depressed that I walked from 63rd Street down to the bottom of Manhattan, stopped in a couple of bookstores along the way, walked back, and as I came into the hotel about 6 o'clock, these staff people jumped on me and said, "Where have you been?" Threw me in a car and we went over to Steve's house. We won New York by 20 points and we had won Connecticut by 7. And it was just a huge, transformative moment in the campaign.

And at the end, on what was then Super Tuesday, Kennedy won most of the big states, but under the proportional representation rules there was no way he was ever going to catch up. He was pretty far behind. So what we did was go to the convention trying to argue for a set of policies. And in the end, on all of them except one, we prevailed on the convention floor. And I think we could have prevailed on the one, except that it would have put Carter in a really impossible position.

Q: But was there pressure, even then? There were people who said some of the same things we heard this year: "The math doesn't add up. Look at the math. The math doesn't add up. You cannot possibly (win). And the rules did not allow the delegates to be free."

SHRUM: Well, you could change the rules and free the delegates. But that wasn't the point. The point was, this year when you said the math doesn't add up, the answer was, "Well, the superdelegates could always vote for me." A very political answer. They would say to Kennedy, "The numbers don't add up." And he'd say, "Let me tell you the numbers that concern me. The numbers of unemployed in this country. The numbers of people without health insurance in this country. The number of people who can't afford to buy a home or can't afford to send their kids to college. That's what concerns me, and I'm going to carry their cause to this convention." And that gave him a platform to stand on, and it was something he actually believed, so it was authentic and real. So it was quite different from this year.

Q: It got personal a little bit, didn't it? There were some ads placed from the Carter side about the Kennedy side, making reference to character issues.

SHRUM: Sure. After New York, the Carter campaign was in severe danger of losing Pennsylvania - big. They lost it narrowly by running a whole group of ads in western Pennsylvania especially saying character really matters in a president. They were trying to play on Chappaquiddick and those concerns. They seem so distant now. It seems, you know, you look at Ted Kennedy and you look at what he has done and what he has stood for and the consistency of principle and conscience, and you look at those ads. They don't go together. But that was then and this is now.

Q: And they took some of your statements, some of your campaigns' statements personally as well, didn't they?

SHRUM: Sure, but most of ours were funny. I mean, you know, Carroll O'Connor made an ad. "Archie Bunker" made an ad that was pretty funny. And he wrote it himself.

Q: What did that one say?

SHRUM: "Oh, he's got the same economic policies as Herbert Hoover and we're going to have an economy that's going to curl your hair." I mean, it was very Archie Bunkeresque.

Q: I wish I could see the "three-strikes" ad that you describe.

SHRUM: I think Julian Kanter at the University of Oklahoma probably has a copy of this. I don't. And David Sawyer, of course, died some years ago, so I don't know where all of those ads are.

Q: But it did what? What did it show?

SHRUM: It showed Carter at a baseball or softball game with the staff and maybe the press corps. And it would mention an issue and it would show Carter swinging and he would miss the ball. So it was, "Three strikes and you're out." But it was a very powerful, it was a funny ad. We weren't very heavy-handed. Not that we ever . . . We might have gotten heavy-handed later on, except we didn't have any money. Kennedy became, I think, and still probably is, the only person in a seriously contested presidential primary to win California without running any television ads. It's an almost impossible thing to do. And Carter had plenty of money to run TV ads.

Q: So by the early part of the summer, though, you knew that the math wasn't going to get you there.

SHRUM: You knew the math wasn't going to get you there, but there were two things, or maybe three. First of all there was unease in the party about renominating Carter. There were people like Edward Bennett Williams, the Washington lawyer, Hugh Carey, the governor of New York, who were saying, "We've got to have an alternative to Carter." They weren't necessarily saying it had to be Kennedy, "But we've got to have an alternative to Carter, because if we send him out there, we're not going to win."

So, and the one thing I was absolutely convinced of, if the open convention rule ever passed (allowing all delegates to vote their consciences freely on the first ballot) we were by far the best organized people and we knew what we were doing, and I think Kennedy would have been the nominee.

Secondly, he really did care about these causes, he really had been to these places like Anderson, Ind., where he had talked to all of these unemployed workers and he did think something should be done. And he was determined to carry that to the convention.

Thirdly, I felt very strongly that the country had never had a fair chance to see him. Carter had refused to debate during the primaries, and had actually not campaigned for most of the primaries, saying he was focusing all his energy on trying to free the hostages from Iran - which ultimately, of course, became a burden for him because people said, you're spending all of your energy trying to free the hostages in Iran, and they're still there. So what helped him in the primaries hurt him badly in the general.

But I thought the country should get the chance to see Kennedy in some unmediated way at the convention, and having the opportunity to give that speech was the right way to do it. There was, I describe in the book, a little back and forth in terms of negotiating and maneuvering on how to give the speech. But there was always a way to give it. You could not be prevented in those days from giving it. The most absurd or farfetched way of doing it would have been to second your own nomination for president. I mean, nobody could keep you from doing that. But we finally negotiated a deal under which I think we had 15 minutes to speak on the platform, and I think he spoke for 47 minutes or something like that. And then I think the applause went on, and the demonstrations went on for another hour, even though we tried to stop them. They just went on and on and on.

Q: Talk about the crafting of that speech. One thing that there's not a whole lot of detail on . . . in your book . . . is the most famous paragraph, how you came to that closing paragraph. A lot of people might not remember what that was, but if you can describe how you crafted that whole speech, what he was trying to do, and then if you could describe what was in that paragraph and why it was there.

SHRUM: Well, first of all, of course, the speech is very much his speech. The reason that people knew that I had something to do with it and that Carey Parker, who has worked for him for 40 years and did a lot of work with me, had something to do with it, was because of him. I was in a cab on the way back to the hotel when I heard somebody on the radio say this speech was written or drafted by Bob Shrum and Carey Parker. And we had so little money that Carey and I were staying in a side bedroom in Sen. Kennedy's suite. And there was a little party going on and I said, "I've got to talk to you for a minute." I said, "Listen, I just heard this on the radio, and I just want you to know I didn't say anything to anybody." And he said, "Oh, I told them . . . Because I just got asked. And if I didn't say that you and Carey worked on it, so-and-so would have said he worked on it, so-and-so would have said he worked on it, so-and-so would have said he worked on it . . . So I said you guys did." It's actually the mark of someone who is remarkably self-confident and generous of spirit.

We went through all of the old speeches, including for example that draft in New York that I talked about when he was thinking of withdrawing. We looked at all the language we had from the past, kept a lot of that language, did a lot of new language. Kennedy, for example, had never - you talk about the passage at the end. Sen. Kennedy had almost never mentioned his brothers, and certainly never mentioned them in a political context since they had been killed. And as he goes into the end of that speech, he quotes, as he says:

"In words of Tennyson, that my brothers often quoted and loved, and that have a special meaning for me now . . .

"'Tho much is taken, much abides

That which we are, we are -

One equal temper of heroic hearts

Strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.'

"For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.'"

So there was this, it was in a way, in the midst of defeat a sense of affirmation. But it reflected very much who he was and who he has been ever since. A spirit of commitment. And, as he says earlier in the speech, "Learning to take issues seriously, but never to take yourself too seriously."

So now, how did the mechanics of this (work)? We went through it. Worked on a first draft. Carey and I worked on the draft. He looked at the draft. Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorenson looked at the draft. And in my book I said, Arthur was really nice and made remarkably few comments. It turns out, if you look at his book, he didn't actually think the speech would work, but afterwards was kind and generous enough to say it worked very, very well. And it was a fairly simple, straightforward process.

There was one part of it that was very, very strange – not strange, but odd. Which was, every time in the TelePrompTer rehearsal, as the roll was going, when we would get to, "I congratulate President Carter on his victory here . . ." Because I actually, the first draft was written as I wrote it as an acceptance speech, because it would be 95 percent the same anyway. But I knew it wasn't going to be an acceptance speech. So there was this one paragraph that we ultimately had in after Monday night when we lost the fight over rules, that said, "I congratulate President Carter on his victory here." And every time we'd get to it in the TelePrompTer, Kennedy would go like this (rolling his finger) and we'd just move on.

Q: What was he saying? What did that mean?

SHRUM: This means, "Move on. I don't want to talk about it right now. I don't want to have to face this yet." But he did face it. Look, Monday night he withdrew. Tuesday night he gave the speech and said "I congratulate President Carter on his victory here." Wednesday night he endorsed Carter. Thursday night we had that unfortunate few moments on the platform that both he and Carter could have done without.

Q: I would like to talk about that moment, actually. Because you had a long explanation for the TelePrompTer, I wanted you to explain . . . There was a certain line in the speech that he had trouble with. What was that line?

SHRUM: Oh, well, one of the lines that we had trouble in the speech . . . When you had the line "desert" you could sometimes read "dessert" so we drew a little palm tree on the TelePrompTer. You couldn't do that today, by the way, because the TelePrompTer isn't paper. And the first line originally was, "I come here tonight not to speak for a candidacy but to affirm a cause," and that became, "I come here tonight not to speak as a candidate but to affirm a cause." I don't know which line you're referring to.

But the prompter, he was absolutely convinced the prompter would break, because it had broken in 1960 when Orville Freeman, the governor of Minnesota, who thought he was on the list for vice president, was nominating JFK. And the speech didn't quite descend into gibberish, but it didn't do very well. And so Carey Parker was underneath the podium with the prompter operator, sort of making sure that was done right. And I was sitting on a step. If he was speaking here, then the platform went like this and there were like three steps. And I was sitting on the second step down, and if the prompter broke, which he was convinced it might, then he was going to put his hand behind his back and go like this, do a circle. Then I was then going to say, say, "17-middle," say, if he was in the middle of the 17th page, then he could just flip to the page and keep going. Of course the prompter didn't break. It did break two months later when we were campaigning for an old bull of the Senate, Warren Magnuson in Washington state. And Kennedy was giving a speech, I'm standing off in the wings, and he kind of looks at me during a pause and I think, "What does he want?" And there's another pause for applause and he looks at me again. And so I move a little, and I can suddenly see the prompter screen, and you can see these two pieces of torn paper (on the prompter) coming apart and burning, because that's what happened in those days. So he was convinced that was going to happen.

Q: When he had a hard time repeating that in practice about conceding to Carter, did he have a hard time knowing that he was eventually going to have to work to help this man get re-elected, after what they had been through on a personal level through that campaign?

SHRUM: I don't think he had a hard time. I think he was a tremendous realist about it. We were in California for the Carter-Reagan debate and we watched it with a whole bunch of big Democratic givers and they were all saying "Carter won, Carter won, Carter won." This was the debate where Reagan looked at Carter and said, "There you go again." It was also the debate where he said, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

(Note: The tape of the interview is unclear in this section. But in his book, "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner," Shrum describes how he and Kennedy left the debate, went to get into a limousine, and Kennedy commented on people who had said Carter was the clear winner of the debate. Shrum wrote: "We were heading to our mini-motorcade when Kennedy said, 'They're crazy,' and asked me what I thought. 'Carter got killed,' I answered. Reagan now seemed more presidential than the president.")

SHRUM: He didn't win. He got killed. You had a realistic sense of what was happening in that election. But we went a lot of places. We did a lot of campaigning for Carter. And I traveled most of the time with Sen. Kennedy. I remember one place. We were at a senior citizens home or somewhere. He said, "What we need to do in this country, and what we need for the next four years is to stand together and re-elect Jimmy Carter." No reaction. And he does have a wonderful sense of humor. He said, "Now wait a minute. I'm going to say that line again. That's what I'm supposed to do. And when I'm done, you're going to applaud. That's what you're supposed to do." (Laughing.) So there wasn't. We had a sense of realism.

Look, people talked about the primaries this year as being divisive. They were divisive in the sense that there were fierce ambitions on both sides, and fierce competition on both sides. There were no great differences of belief or commitment on both sides, so that changed the character of the race.

Q: So when Jimmy Carter, a couple days later, Jimmy Carter gets up to make his acceptance speech, there's a whole plan for what Ted Kennedy is going to do afterwards. Where was Ted Kennedy when the speech was going on? Where did he listen to the speech?

SHRUM: He was in his hotel suite. There was a long negotiation about when to go to the convention. One possibility was to go as soon as Mondale finished and while they were introducing Carter. And that wouldn't happen because the cameras might cut away. The Carter people didn't want that. Then we could go during Mondale's speech or the nominating speeches for Mondale. And they didn't want that because the cameras would cut away. In the end the decision was, we would leave the minute Carter finished. There was going to be a demonstration that was going to last at least 45 minutes. We could certainly get to Madison Square Garden in that period of time. And several things happened.

So we were in the hotel suite, and Kennedy was actually taking a shower in the early part of listening to the speech. And when Carter made a slip of the tongue and - he was going through a list of great Democrats and said that, you know, that great Democrat who could have been president and should have been president, "Hubert Horatio Hornblower - Humphrey," which sort of must have been the nickname, in fact, I believe it was the nickname that sometimes was derisively applied to Humphrey in the Carter enterprise in 1976. Kennedy sort of came out of the shower and said, "What did he just say?"

But anyway, we got ready, we had practiced, he raised my hand at part of the practice (the same way he planned to raise Carter's hand in triumph on stage). We left as soon as the speech ended. But they had handed out a huge number of tickets, to the point where the fire marshal closed down the convention hall. The speech did not go very well. So there wasn't 45 minutes of applause and demonstration afterwards. And to deal with that, Bob Strauss, who was the chairman of the DNC or the chairman of the convention - I forget what his official role was; Tip O'Neill was the chairman of the convention - but he started calling people up. Governor so-and-so, Senator so-and-so, keep the thing going.

By the time we pulled up – and, by the way, we still had Secret Service protection, but intersection control had been taken away, we were told by Mayor Koch who didn't much like Sen. Kennedy. But that meant we had to stop at all these red lights.

So we got there and we walk in, and I look at him and I said, "Remember, you've got to hold up his hand." He said, "Sure." And I came around the corner as he went up the steps. And I looked up at the podium which was now filled with dozens and dozens of people who had been called up to keep this thing going. And I thought to myself, "This probably isn't going to happen." And it didn't. They shook hands. And in the meantime, the balloons wouldn't drop. I mean, it was a star-crossed operation. The Carter operation at this point was star-crossed. They had all these balloons in the ceiling and the balloons wouldn't drop. So suddenly the advance guy who doesn't know who I am, but I'm standing next to him, is saying into his little microphone, "Stop trying to drop the balloons!" Finally, the balloons come down. Carter looks like he's chasing Kennedy around the stage. Kennedy is actually looking for Carter. They shake hands. I have no doubt that if Carter had taken his hand and gone like this (holding it above his head), it would have happened. But it didn't.

Q: It was perceived and interpreted in different ways, wasn't it?

SHRUM: Oh yeah, it was perceived by some people as "Kennedy had done all this intentionally." It wasn't in his interest to do it intentionally. The fact was, we did do what we were told. We left when the speech ended. The demonstration didn't last, and we got there and, yeah, I wish he'd have raised his hand. I certainly wished Carter had raised Kennedy's hand, because Kennedy would have done it. I wished Kennedy had raised Carter's hand, but it just didn't happen.

I don't think it would have made, by the way, a slight, the slightest bit of difference in the outcome of the election.

Q: Would it have made any difference if he had conceded after any of the earlier contests when it was clear that the nomination was going to go to Carter anyway?

SHRUM: I've never understood this theory. Why would the country, once Reagan reassured them that he wasn't going to blow up the world, and once they saw him and he seemed like a nice guy, why would the country want to re-elect a president who had double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, a recession, a hostage crisis that he couldn't solve in Iran, and a Soviet invasion in Afghanistan combined with draft registration, and an energy crisis that was just going on and on? I think Jimmy Carter was, fairly or unfairly, almost certain to lose in 1980. So I don't think it would have made the slightest bit of difference if Kennedy had gotten out earlier.

Q: So many people we talked to point to 1980 as the kind of convention you don't want, where there's a fight that goes all the way to the wire, and a perception at least that there's a split party. You've heard that in the run-up to 2008, everyone was pointing, "You don't want 1980. You don't want 1980." But it sounds like your response is that it wouldn't have made a dime's worth of difference.

SHRUM: Well, I've always made two distinctions, and I actually wrote about this during the primaries. The first was that sometimes there are things worth fighting for and you take them to a convention, but they have to be larger than personal ambition. There have to be issues. You have to be able to say with a straight face, you know, "I carry the cause of my campaign to this convention," and have it represent a real cause other than your own desire to be president. And secondly, Democrats are in very good shape to win this year. It would have been very, very, very difficult for Democrats, in fact I think all but impossible for Democrats to win in 1980, for Jimmy Carter to win in 1980. I think the Democratic Party would have had to change, would have sent a very powerful signal that it was moving in a new direction before the country would have taken a second look.

All you have to do is look at the debate at the end. Reagan debates Carter. Carter agrees to this debate. The minute the country sort of feels comfortable with Reagan, they all just go to him.

The other thing I never understood about the Carter campaign - you'd have to talk to people who were involved in it - is why there was no sense of a positive, forward program. Why the argument was, "Yeah, things are tough, but life is no sugar candy mountain, and you know, we just have to get through all of this stuff." There was no sense of "here's the hope, here's what I'm offering you, here's the difference it will make if I get elected." And, you know, I don't know if that would have made a difference, but it was the only thing you could do.

Q: One of the people that we talked to on this tour was Walter Mondale. I thought I'd read you his summary of that 1980 race.

* * *

(Below are excerpts of an earlier Rocky Mountain News interview with former Vice President Walter Mondale that were read to Bob Shrum.)

MONDALE: "Kennedy came to the convention trying to break up the alliances that we had that were surely going to nominate Carter for re-election . . . And his speech at our 1980 convention was not a plea for unity, not a plea for the re-election of Carter, it was a plea to the Americans not to forget how good they were and how their day would come. The dream would never die and all that stuff . . . But that convention and the stuff meant that we couldn't raise money. It all went into that fight. We couldn't unify behind a theme until after the convention. I think if you have a weak, divided election, the American people say, 'You can't govern because you don't have your own family together . . .'"

* * *

SHRUM: I don't think the American people had doubts about Jimmy Carter's capacity to govern because of the convention. I think they had doubts about his capacity to govern because of the way he governed for the four years he had been president. I have great respect for Walter Mondale, but the truth is, there were real differences, there were big issues, and Kennedy wasn't going to walk away from them and quite frankly, a lot of the party wasn't going to walk away from them.

There were a lot of people who voted for Kennedy in the primaries who I believe voted for Reagan in the general. And they didn't do that because Kennedy had run. They did it because they were dissatisfied with Carter.

The other thing I would say, by the way, is, I think Kennedy's speech at the convention - and we didn't talk about this aspect of it - was probably the most effective dissection of Ronald Reagan ever delivered anywhere, at any time when Reagan was in public life. And it was done with humor and panache, and the convention loved it, and it actually would have told, I think, Carter if he had paid attention, something about how to run against Reagan, which is you couldn't run against him wielding a sledgehammer against this affable guy, saying he's going to blow up the world, or he's a bigot, or he's anti-Catholic, which at one point someone in the Carter campaign suggested Kennedy should go out and say.

Look, I don't want to, you asked these questions. I have no interest in retracing all these old quarrels. They're over. Mondale I have immense respect for. I think Kennedy very much wanted him in the Senate after Paul Wellstone died. They're very good friends. But I think Walter Mondale knows there were some very, very big things at stake in 1980. In fact, I believe Mondale himself, after Carter went up to Camp David, spent a couple of weeks there talking to people, came down and gave a speech on a "crisis of confidence" in the country - where, incidentally, by the way, he used the phrase "I feel your pain," which didn't work as well for him as it did for Bill Clinton; and then fired part of his cabinet. I think Mondale thought about resigning at that point.

So, I don't - look. There were strong feelings. People, I still think national health insurance is a cause worth fighting for. And we'd better win it soon because we keep telling the country we're going to do something about it, and it doesn't get done.

Q: In that famous line, "the dream shall never die," he was talking about a whole series of things that he and the people in the party had been fighting for, that he and his constituents had been fighting for . . .

SHRUM: And his brothers.

Q: Is there a lesson in that for the Democrats this year in terms of standing for those traditional things that he stood for?

SHRUM: See, there's also a part of that speech that says, you know, "times change, ideas change, but values endure." And I think his message was that there are enduring values. And obviously, as he says, "the answers of one generation are not the answers of the next." But there is, I believe, a fundamental lesson for the Democratic Party which Republicans have learned pretty well, which is, that in the long run, you are best off standing up for what you believe in fighting for. They got killed in the Goldwater election in 1964. Nixon was sort of a hiatus in between. But then the Republican Party began to assert its essential conservative identity - and I mean, I don't have to agree with any of this - but as a matter of principle began to assert it, fight for it, and took a country that thought conservative was a bad word, make conservative the good word and liberal the bad word. Now I think the terms are losing all validity and interest to people now, but I think one of the great appeals that Obama has is not that he is somehow or another a stereotypical liberal, which I think the Republicans would like to make him, but that people think he has deep wellsprings of belief, and that he has the capacity to touch the country's conscience and move people to action and involvement. That's what Kennedy was talking about in 1980. And I think that's what his brother was talking about in 1960. And frankly, to be fair, I think that's what Ronald Reagan was talking about from a different perspective for the Republican Party. It's not just Democrats who have the capacity to touch a responsive chord. It's Republicans sometimes. Reagan was a prime example of that.

Q: So I'm going to move to some very specific questions about some advice for the Democrats going to Denver. You're one of the great speechwriters, considered one of the great speechwriters of all times.

SHRUM: I tried to get out of writing speeches forever, you know. (Laughing.)

Q: Since you might not be offering up your services directly to them, I'm going to ask you: What kinds of themes and what kind of phrases do you think that Barack Obama needs in his acceptance speech?

SHRUM: I think Barack Obama needs to be himself. He has had a coherent, consistent, compelling message from the beginning of the campaign. He needs to stay with that message. I mean, it will be amplified in different ways, but it is about changing America. It is about giving it back its future and its hope. And that has to be, for me, the essence of what Obama talks about at this convention.

He is, personally, a very good writer, and I suspect will write a lot of his own speech, as he wrote a lot of his own speech in 2004. But I think the whole convention has to be upbeat. I think, at a time when Americans, only 17 percent of Americans think the country is on the right track, they don't need a political party to tell them how bad things are. They're living that in their daily lives. They need political leadership to tell them how to make things better. I mean, I have this theory about two strains of rhetoric in the Democratic Party. One is the Roosevelt-Kennedy strain. Roosevelt, in the middle of the Depression: "This great nation will endure as it has endured. We'll revive and we'll prosper." Kennedy, when things are really tough in the Cold War: "We can do better. Things may get worse before they get better, but we're going to do what we have to do, and we're going to send a man to the moon and there's this whole sense of hope." And then on the other side, you have the Stevenson-Carter strain. And I have great admiration for Adlai Stevenson, but it basically tells you how bad things are. The beginning of Stevenson's acceptance speech, which you should look at for this series, is quite interesting. It says: "I accept your nomination and your platform. I wish these words could have been uttered by a better, a stronger, a wiser man than I, but O, heavenly father, if this cup will not pass from me, then I must drink of it." That may not be exact, but that's very close. So he's comparing being nominated for president to the agony in the garden. And then at the end of the speech he says, the 20th century, "the worst period in the history of man." I mean, it's not something that inspires and invigorates people and makes them think that they're going to overcome their difficulties. And that was part of Carter's problem, too. I mean, the whole, if you look at his acceptance speech of 1980, it's actually an instructive model. It was written by a very talented person, Rick Hertzberg, who is now at The New Yorker. It's not a speech that leaves you with a lot of sense of optimism. It tells you things are tough, and that's the way it is. And, you know, life, as Winston Churchill said, and I think I quoted this earlier, is not a sugar candy mountain. So you put that, that was Carter's message. Reagan's message was: America's best days are yet to come. I can tell you who's going to win that contest with the American people.

Q: We had that very conversation with Walter Mondale about his speech (in 1984). We talked quite a bit and finally he conceded: "a little too much root-canal, I think."

SHRUM: In '84?

Q: In '84.

SHRUM: Eighty-four was amazing because Kennedy had introduced him at the convention. Kennedy and I were sitting underneath as he was giving the speech. He got to this paragraph about taxes, and Kennedy looked at me and said, "What did he say?" I mean it was like, we were stunned, you know, that he would . . . (Mondale said that either he or Reagan would raise people's taxes after the election.) And it was done so baldly. But in his defense, I will say, that he was so far behind, he was so unlikely to win that he was trying to be bold. Picking Ferraro was bold. Saying "I'll raise taxes" was bold. It didn't work. And by the way that's the perfect example of what's wrong with polling. Because you can go out and ask a polling question saying, "If it's necessary to reduce the deficit and keep America strong, would you favor raising taxes?" Now who's going to say "No?" But once you propose it, people say, ah, it actually won't be used to reduce the deficit. It will be spent, it will be wasted, and it's not necessary to keep America strong and it will make us weak. So the poll can take you into a cul-de-sac where you make the wrong decision. But it's interesting that you pursued him on that.

Q: He was very candid.

VIDEOGRAPHER JUDY DEHAAS: His answer was exactly what you just said. It was bold and he needed something.

Q: We got into the Hail Mary pass talk.

SHRUM: I might have suggested a different Hail Mary pass. This was kind of a Hail Mary lateral backwards. Because I think the polling was misleading.

But look, they have never been given credit. The Mondale campaign has never been given credit in '84, that they were dead in the primaries and came back from the dead.

Just to add, actually, my cousin could have run the Reagan campaign and he would have carried 48 or 49 states. What was miraculous was how the Mondale operation - and Jim Johnson was a key to it - put this together so Mondale recovered and became the nominee, and for a brief moment after the first debate looked like he might have a very small chance.

Q: He considers that one of the most successful . . . conventions for that reason because they did have that consistent progress every night that you haven't always seen.

SHRUM: In 2000, we had a little inching progress each night. And then Gore, who went in, depending on what poll you believed, 10, 12, 13 points behind, kissed his wife, gave his acceptance speech, and by Saturday was 5 points ahead.

* * *

Q: I'd like to ask you about Ted Kennedy . . . What do you think his experience in 1980 and everything that has come since then, where does that leave him in the Democratic Party? What is his legacy in the Democratic Party and in the country?

SHRUM: Ted Kennedy's legacy in the country is as the greatest senator in the last 100 years and I don't think there's much dispute about that. He may be the most productive legislator of all time, and he has played a very unusual, dual role. He has been the conscience of the Democratic Party and the conscience of progressive values, but he has also been the person that has been able to reach across the aisle and work with Republicans, whether it was George W. Bush, whom almost no Democrats can work with, or John McCain, or Orrin Hatch on children's health care.

You look at almost every piece of legislation that represents social advance in this country, it has his mark on it. Student loans, the minimum wage, the Voting Rights Act, Title IX and the fact that women have more equal chances in our society, you just go down the list. Sanctions on South Africa. I went with him on a trip to South Africa and we came back. Sanctions had been a fairly marginal issue up to that point. The black caucus was pushing them hard. Kennedy then took them up. They passed. And Reagan was very, very unhappy about them but they helped bring down the apartheid regime. So I think that's, that's . . . And by the way, I think he has still more to contribute to that legacy.

In the Democratic Party there is an enormous affection and respect for him, because as I said earlier he is the conscience of progressive values. People think he always stands up for what he believes in. And he is for me at least, and I think for most Democrats, a very appealing human being. I mean, he has this capacity to laugh at himself, to understand the absurdity of the world around him at times, but to never give up and to keep fighting.

I mean, I worked for him for years. He's my friend and if he wants me to do something, I do it. And you know, he could live almost any life that he wanted. And this is the life he chose, and it's the life of public service that I think speaks both to the values of the Democratic Party, to the values of his brothers . . .

One of the things that has been very interesting. Somebody said to me, "Where does he fit in the Kennedy legacy?" I said he has massively expanded the Kennedy legacy.

I hope and pray and believe that we'll see him back on the floor of the U.S. Senate and see him at the convention.

Q: Given all that, all that that has happened and the fact that he has got that affection now, would you have foreseen it after that tough, rough-and-tumble race (in 1980)?

SHRUM: All you have to do is go look at the tape of the audience during the speech. Remember, that's a convention that Carter is going to win the delegates by a fairly substantial margin. Look at the delegates standing on the floor. All the Carter delegates are standing on chairs. Some of them are crying. They're all cheering. There was a deep affection for him at that time, and a lot of respect for what he stood for and what he believed. He had just taken on the burden of running against an incumbent president in his own party at a time when a number of unpredictable crises happened that helped President Carter get renominated but made it difficult for him to get re-elected.

Q: This is my last question: What is the best way that the party could honor him in Denver - with their actions, not necessarily the symbolic actions, but what's the best way they could honor Sen. Kennedy?

SHRUM: Well, make a real commitment to pass national health reform and get it done. I mean, we've talked about this now for years and years. We have to move on this. We have to get this done.

I don't think - he's not the kind of person who's terribly interested in standing there waving while people say nice things about him. He's actually very interested in results. I think the great unfinished work of his public service is national health care and I want to see that get done while he's there fighting for it in the Senate.

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