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Mark Penn: Power Center in the Clinton Campaign

If you want to understand Hillary Clinton (and more importantly, her campaign) read up on Mark Penn.

Anne Kornblut has the goods:

While not her campaign manager in name, Penn controls the main elements of her campaign, most important her attempt to define herself to an electorate seemingly ready for a Democratic president but possibly still suffering from Clinton fatigue.

Armed with voluminous data that he collects through his private polling firm, Penn has become involved in virtually every move Clinton makes, with the result that the campaign reflects the chief strategist as much as the candidate.

Here's the first red flag: Penn's data is from polling. Compare that to Rove whose data was from direct mail. It's the difference between what a respondent says and what they actually do. It's one thing to answer a poll -- and quite another to give money. And Rove was very good at figuring out what prompted people to give money. Very, very good. Is Penn that good with his data? We'll have to wait and see.

Penn is a longtime pollster for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council whose clients have included Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.).
Can you see the steam coming out of my ears at this point?
[Penn] is a wealthy chief executive who heads a giant public relations firm, where he personally hones Microsoft's image in Washington.
None of that open source Linux crap for Mark Penn, nosiree!
Penn plays down his role in advising Clinton on Iraq. "I'm definitely not a national security adviser," he said in an interview in his office. "I think I understand the issue. But I leave that to the policy advisers who are very close to her."

It was Penn, famously rumpled and awkward in public, who picked a fight at a Harvard forum this year when he disrupted a mild exchange between consultants to accuse Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of equivocating on Iraq..."When they got to the Senate, Senator Obama's votes were exactly the same" as Clinton's, Penn told the panel...His remarks enraged David Axelrod, a senior Obama adviser, who called the characterization dishonest.

How so? I seem to remember seeing a side by side comparison of Clinton and Obama voting patterns on Iraq (sorry no link) and they were (with one exception) identical. Score one for Penn.

Penn has deep roots in the national security wing of the Democratic Party, along with other centrist Democrats -- some of them Jewish and pro-Israel, like Penn -- who saw the merits of invading Iraq before the war began.

Penn gained his foreign policy expertise working on numerous campaigns overseas, especially in Israel. In 1981, he and business partner Doug Schoen helped reelect Menachem Begin...

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then -- in both Israel and the US. Still, Penn represents a relative rarity -- a Democrat who is somewhat sympathetic to the Israeli right-wing. Wonder what we'll be saying about that a year from now -- or four.

Penn sounds a defensive note about his work for Lieberman, insisting that the senator, who all but broke with his party last year over the war in Iraq, bears no relation to [Clinton]
Defensive? You bet. He doesn't have a death wish.
[Dick] Morris, whose innovative, granular style of polling made him a favorite of Hillary Clinton's, hired Penn and Schoen at the beginning of 1995
I'm sure Fox News (and Morris) will have more to say about this as time goes on.
Penn manages both [Clinton's strategy] and a multimillion-dollar corporation as worldwide chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, a 2,000-employee public relations firm...Among their clients over the years were AT&T, Eli Lilly, Texaco and Microsoft.

Penn said that he has been cleared of all client responsibilities, except for Microsoft, for the duration of the campaign but that he still relies on a team of about 20 employees to do most of the day-to-day work. Though running a major company and a presidential campaign at the same time would seem to provide a number of possible conflicts, Penn insists there are none...Nonetheless, it is an unusual arrangement.

You bet it is. I don't like how this smells.

Penn's pitch [goes] something like this: Of course Hillary Clinton can win the presidency. She is already winning. Or, as Penn put it in an interview when asked to summarize the pitch: "She is ahead in the primaries, ahead or tied in the primary states, ahead in the general, ahead or tied in states like Florida and Ohio."...[He has] mapped out a specific strategy for victory in the electoral college: luring to the Democratic Party several percentage points' worth of women as well as more Hispanics, two groups to which Clinton traditionally appeals.

"When you look at this thing nationally -- how is she going to win -- I think it's really important to look at what were the two groups that defected from the Democrats in 2004 to give it to Bush," Penn said. "And those were women and Latino voters. And almost all the change in that election from 2000 was among those two groups, and those are her two strongest groups. And I think that's some of the reason you see her doing so well in places like Ohio and Florida -- because I think those are both states that she could take."

And then, he said, "you won't have to go any further on the map."

Hope he's right. But I have my doubts. This doesn't sound much better than Rove's "50% plus 1" strategy. It worked for Rove -- but didn't leave any kind of a margin for error. I'd much rather see them take Ohio and Florida and expand the battleground into states like Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri.

His concerns, to the extent he has any, are about getting the "Hillary story" out -- humanizing her. At a recent gathering of donors, Penn said, he asked the group: "Who here knows where Hillary is from?"

"Not one, really, guessed that it was in the Chicago suburbs," Penn said. "They really didn't know. They drew a blank. So, a lot of people always say to me, well, they know everything about Hillary. It's not true. There's really a lot to tell."

Make no mistake -- Hillary is not my first choice. But I'd be thrilled to see her get the nomination and win the White House.

But -- on a lot of things -- the style and substance of Mark Penn rubs me the wrong way.


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