It may be too early for the post-mortems on the presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY.
But given her troubles of late, the pre-mortems are rolling in.
There’s enough blame to go around, but Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, is taking a lot of the hits.
“No matter how much bad stuff happened, (Clinton) kept to her Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn,” wrote Frank Rich in Sunday’s The New York Times.
In a sense, though, who could blame her?
Penn, the CEO of a large and powerful public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, knows campaigns, people and voting trends.
Drawn to Bill Clinton’s team by Dick Morris, he helped fashion President Clinton’s 1996 re-election. Penn was also a leader in Hillary Clinton’s successful senatorial campaign in 2000.
And he guided Britain’s Tony Blair to his third re-election as prime minister, just as he put Israel’s Menachem Begin in the win column.
But the question remains, how did Penn lose his touch this time around, if, in fact, he did?
For one thing, analysts suggest, he read his own book, Microtrends: The Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes.
In Microtrends, Penn and co-author E. Kinney Zalesne divide the American public into emerging demographic categories. (Stay-at-home workers, etc.)
“There is no One America any more, or Two or Three or Eight,” Penn writes. “In fact, there are hundreds of Americas, hundreds of new niches made up of people drawn together by common interests.”
Politicians and corporations like this kind of analysis, as it gives them groups to target.
However, Obama and his advisers have placed far more emphasis on the macro over the micro. Their message of unity and change essentially argues that there could be one America.
Penn may say that the numbers don’t back this up. At least for now, many voters are saying something different.
Confident in his numbers, and willing to go on the attack, Penn has not been shy about appearing before the cameras. But his take-no-prisoners style may not have played well this time around.
He drew flak in December for what seemed to be a clumsy attempt to tag Obama with youthful cocaine use.
And Penn didn’t win any points recently for saying that Obama’s primary wins, with the exception of his victory in Illinois, weren’t in “significant” states. (Take that, Wisconsin and South Carolina.)
In addition, given the attention last week paid to Sen. John McCain’s connections to lobbyists, it’s not surprising that Penn has become example A of Clinton’s connections to lobbyists.
Penn is such a Washington insider, in fact, that he’s the nominal boss of Charles R. Black Jr., a key McCain adviser and spokesman.
Black is the chairman of BKSH & Associates, a lobbying firm that is a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller, the company Penn heads.
Another of Penn’s companies, the polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, has been paid at least $4 million by the Clinton campaign and is owed millions more. Some have suggested that this means Penn wins even if his candidate loses.
Despite Clinton’s recent run of defeats, Penn continues to argue that she can emerge as the ultimate winner.
In a Feb. 13 memo, he predicted that the demographics in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, states that hold primaries on March 4, favor Clinton.
If Penn is right, and Clinton does well in those three, the media could then turn to blaming David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist. He’s a man who has been praised so far for being alert to macro-trends, the other side of the demographic coin.
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