Two years ago, Republican Scott Brown’s surprising election to the Senate made stars out of Mitt Romney confidant Eric Fehrnstrom and his partners at The Shawmut Group, the consulting firm credited with guiding an obscure GOP state senator to a statewide victory in left-leaning Massachusetts.
For the 2012 political cycle, the group worked exclusively on two high-profile races: Brown’s attempted reelection to the Senate seat once held by liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy, and Romney’s Republican presidential campaign.
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Maybe "landslide" Dick Morris can get a job with these folks. By the way, I really don't see it as a "strategy" to stake out positions to win the primary, then lie and say you never said that in the general election, and hope the electorate is too stupid to notice. Anyway, perhaps ol' "landslide" can help them formulate a new "winning" strategy.
...speaking of Dick, I saw him on one of the news programs "explaining" how he screwed up so profoundly and magnificently with his prediction. Like somebody cares. "Don't ya get it Dick, it's like your car mechanic "explaining" how/why he forgot to put the 4th wheel back on the car after you total the car in an accident." He is just clueless about the occupation he is in, and rendering the services he's charging customers money for, and needs to look for a new job.
Fehrnstrom uses sleazy tactics. Professionalism? Please.
Yeah and David Axlerod is a paragon of virtue.
"overextended"? Please. They just suck at their business.
Sorry, Eric, I guess the public just surprised you with their own etch-a-sketch moment. I guess this time the system just didn't work for you. Try another career, like dunning folks for bills.
There were two flawed candidates. Brown seems like a nice guy with a nice family. He had a track record in DC which was a problem for the voters. Romney is an awkward guy who really didn't know what it meant to be President. He wanted to live out his father's script and have a check mark on his resume. His track record in business was a problem, and his overall life course has been symptomatic of too many things which stood in the way of being an effective political leader. His type needs to stay in business, where people don't disagree with him. The consultants hitched their wagon to two guys with too much baggage. That the races were as close as they were said that the consultants did a great job. Give them a great candidate, and they'll do fine.
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Agree entirely Lawyer. Brown stopped being a "nice guy" as soon as he started knowingly lying about Warren. As the article states, it is up to the Candidate to decided and consultants do not dictate. Warren is responsible for showing his true colors and for that, I thank everyone involved.
The role of consultants: to be throw overboard if things go bad. That's mostly what Romney's vaunted 'business experience' taught him. / / / Let's face it, in Romney, the Shawmut Group had a pretty tough sell: mediocre product of unknown reliabilty, that was potentially hazardous, produced by a company with a terrible reputation for customer service. / / / With Brown, voters initially passed on the boring family sedan and instead picked up a closed end lease on sporty car that three years later turned out to be something of lemon, and no matter how much the dealer pressured them to buy the car at the end of the lease, they decided to go with a new, less flashy model, but one with a far better Consumer Reports rating.
The Shawmut Group skrewed up and shouldn't be paid one lousy penny for their mess. They provided a mish-mash for the Republican volunteers with poor communication, poor instructions and INCORRECT instructions mailed to volunteers . . . and non-working communication lines.
Too many workers, the campaign 'experts,' didn't know a damn thing about what was expected from the volunteers on election day!
Hey Cambridge guy - don't overthink it (like the Brown and Romney campaigns did) it's simple: Bad Product = Poor Sales.
“To me the true test of a consultant is, ‘Do you win races in states you shouldn’t win races?’ ” Answer: No, they did not.
Let's face it, EF is a pretty sleezy guy. He hitched himself to a guy with mega-money who beat the wounded Shannon O'Brian. He then hitched himself to the light weight pretty boy who was an excellent campaigner then especially when measured against the napping Martha Coakley. His main skill seems to be making a candidate appear other than they are. But don't get me wrong. I want him on the other team when we have a good candidate. And, even though it deeply coarsens campaigns to have people like EF around, his nastiness and lack of success makes me root for his participation in future campaigns. I think they might go together.
It wasn't that they spread themselves too thin, it was the message, or lack thereof, that they failed to convey. An incumbent US Senator, even a Republican one in Massachusetts, has a strong advantage over an opponent. They squandered that advantage in accentuating the trivial whlile ignoring the important.
The bottom line, both Gov.Mitt Romney and Senator Scott Brown lost to inferior candidates.
It's really hard to imagine anyone being inferior to those two slugs.
At the risk of sounding like our GOP troll brethern (a Fehrnstrom "innovation") how do you write an article on Shawmut without mentioning the greatest gaffe of the cycle: Eric Fehrnstroms promise to "shake the Etch-A-Sketch." Romney already had a rep for "evolving" minute to minute. Eric made it a concrete reality. As the LA Times said at the time:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/21/news/la-pn-romney-campaign-failing-to-shake-off-etch-a-sketch-label-20120321
Mitt Romney's victory lap the day after the Illinois Republican primary has been erased by an Etch-A-Sketch, leaving the candidate to deal with a new wave of online mockery aimed at Romney’s perceived tendency to adjust his views.
Nice PR work for Eric Fehrnstrom, Mark...
Unencumbered by competence, intelligence, or ethics is not a winning strategy. Shawmut has established a record of defeat as the result of a 'say anything to win' strategy. A bit more circumspection goes a long way, and they don't have it. At the very least, they need to make a strong showing with a candidate who goes down to defeat but at least sticks with matters of principle; that at least brings respectability, and they don't even have that. Brown may have doomed himself on those three critical votes, but he'd have been a stronger losing candidate if he had articulated his principles behind his choices and stuck with them. Instead, he (and Romney in the race for the Presidency) opted for the 'etch-a-sketch', thinking erroneously that the voters (or more importantly, their opponents) have truly short memories.
Gov.Romney's Campaign Team failed to do their job: 1) The ground volunteers were not trained or received poor training, 2) volunteers were mailed inaccurate instructions, and 3) Campaign Team support just wasn't there!!!! Worst case scenario, mixed messages, inexperienced Campaign Team.
November 6, 2012 was a disaster due to very, very poor communication, poll volunteers lacking the correct identification and trying to cope with contrary Democrat poll workers and aggressive Democrat volunteers.
Give us _one_, _one_ incident of "agreesive Democratic volunteers." I can give you entire states where Republican administrations tried to suppress the vote.
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Brown won his senate seat because he ran against a zombie, not Ted Kennedy! Not a significant achievement!
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Personally, I'm not inpressed with the Shawmut Group. Their losing record isn't too impressive, either.
They advised a presidential candidate to say anything that would resound with the group-du-jour, and told him - and everyone else, that it was okay to clear the etch-a-sketch as the campaign moved on.
They advised an incumbent senator to avoid defending his record and instead spend most of his campaign harping on his opponent's heredity. And they apparently didn't tell him that lying about his positions on women's issues, lying about a bill he really didn't author, and telling fanciful stories that made him look important wouldn't fly with voters here.
I saw Brown out picking up his own yard signs on Saturday, and he was doing it without the help of these advisers. That's a start.
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I love it guys who haven't been on a winning presidential campaign for over a decade endorsing a consultant group on an eight campaign losing streak...classic log rolling. There is more than enough blame for the Romney / Brown trainwreck to go around. If I was Beth Myers I wouldn't lead with the polarizing "picked Ryan" on her highlight reel. Repeat after me "Florida key state/ Latino vote /Rubio." I'll give you that common sense stroke of genius for free.
Eric Mein Fuher Fuhrnstrom couldn't get an Eskimo elected in Alaska.
Who picked Paul Ryan ? Scared Seniors and couldn't carry his own state. Maybe Susan Martinez the Governor of New Mexico would have been a better choice. The GOP could care less about Latinos amnd Women and have decades in front of them to prove otherwise.
The GOP with run Rubio.....Just because you put up a Hispanice candidate doesn't mean all Hispanics will run and vote for hi,. Maybe it works that way with mormons but Hispanics and women are much smarted and more informed about the issues.
This has nothing to do with savvy. It has everything to do with having the kind of political imagination that allows one to launch dirty personal attacks. Call it political porn. Brown paid the price for that. Our former senator and legendary "Mr. Nice Guy" needed what Etch-A-Sketch Fuhrnstrom couldn't possibly give him: scruples.
I guess you could write it off to a heavy workload. Is that the line that Rove is using now?
And left leaning Massachusetts? Did Eric write the lead for this piece? We tend to vote Democrat but that does not equate with left despite what Eric and Faux news would have you believe.
As Bill Parcells said, "You're as good as your record." And one out of ten is absolutely dismal. Also, that one was a special election in an off-year, against a stupidly over-confident candidate (Coakley) who put out no effort. This past one was the real test. It's pretty hard to dislodge an incumbent who hasn't done something really terrible. Scott Brown didn't do much in his three years, but he was decisively rejected. And Shawmut did him a terrible disservice, with negative attack ads from the beginning. Although Brown IS the one who "approved those messages". >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Yes, it's true that Shawmut had two less than desirable candidates in Brown and Romney; but, if you can only win with proven winners, what does that say?
Don't foget about Fehrnstrom's "KrazyKhazei" twitter acount. Remember that one? He was caught red-handed sending tweets making fun of Alan Khazei. Oops. Sorry, Eric. Just thought I'd help everyone remember that one.
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Just imagine the nerve! Making fun of Alan Khazei! That is just about as low as one can go. In fact, I believe that it is probably a RICO offense? And in Brookline, Cambridge, Concord and Lincoln it probably amounts to a hate crime.
wonder how much he made? Hope payment wasn't based on a win!
Yet another over-long political piece that misses the glaringly obvious elephant in the room. Eric Fehrnstrom is a vicious dishonest fraud. His "strategies" for each candidate had the effect of negating the strongest assets of each -- he turned "nice guy" Scott Brown into an incompetent bullying coward, and most-electable moderate Mitt Romney into a flip-flopping misogynist. Mr. Fehrnstom's very first public appearance for Mr. Romney was proudly celebrating his flagrantly deceitful mis-quote of Barack Obama. His first effort for Scott Brown was the self-destructive "heritage" attacks on "Professor" Warren. Each campaign went downhill from there.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I find it striking that this puff-piece for Eric Fehrnstrom says absolutely NOTHING about the abject failure of these vicious attacks that seem to be the only arrow in Mr. Fehrnstrom's quiver. We readers are left to wonder how would-be journalists like Mr. Arsenault so badly miss the story.
I agree with many of the comments. What's missing is something on the Globe's editorial judgement. This is what they used to call a puff piece. Tom Winship would be appalled.
Romney's greatest blunder was in failing to act more aggressively following the first presidential debate. Remember: Romney had the highly overrated Emperor-without-clothes frazzled and on the ropes. But "Nice Mitt" utterly failed to press his advantage, opting instead for the four corner offense (who gave him that advice?). We will never know whether the American people would have responded favorably to a candidate who called out not only Obama but also the craven mainstream press for their treacherous and deceitful handling of the Benghazi affair, where heroic Americans were left to hold the fort alone for over seven hours while their calls for help went unanswered. Worse, whAs it was, despite Romney's feckless campaign, Obama received 10M fewer votes in 2012 than in 2008. You have to be one desperate "progressive" to call that a mandate.