Stuart Stevens, a political consultant and author, joined the Federalist Radio Hour today to talk about his new book, The Last Season. Stevens reflects on experiencing the Ole Miss football season he with his father as well as his time on the Romney 2012 campaign.
For the 2013 season, Stevens and his 95-year-old father attended all the Ole Miss football games together, sharing a number of joys, disappointments, and life lessons on those autumn Saturdays. He explained how his Mississippi upbringing brought him into the world of politics. “I’d always been interested in three things in my life: politics, film and writing. I’ve kind of tried to pursue all three, at various time and to various degrees of intensity,” he said.
Stevens said spent a lot of time thinking about loss after the 2012 campaign. “Loss is the key that we live in, the key which life is played in. I think it’s how we adjust to that and embrace it,” he said. “One of the things that politics gave me was a very easy way to keep score and compete. I embraced it with an obsession with winning and i think that was a way not to think about the larger question of loss.”
Domenech and Stevens also discussed the 2016 campaigns and the elite analyst opinions. Stevens said he doesn’t think an outsider, non-politician candidate will get the nomination because it’s never happened before. “Usually in politics whenever we say, ‘this time it’s going to be different,’– it’s usually not different, it’s just a question of when it’s not going to be different.”
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