For months during the heated contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mark J. Penn was the Hillary Clinton adviser everyone loved to hate.
The pollster’s people skills were derided. His tactics were deplored. And his ideas were seen as out-of-touch with a changing America.
Consequently, with the failure of the Clinton effort, it seemed that Penn had become political persona non grata.
But a just published story by Joshua Green in The Atlantic magazine on Clinton’s failed run shows that Penn at least had a plan that might have worked for his candidate.
And now it appears that Penn might even be able to do an end run on his reputation and become a sort of adviser to the Obama campaign.
In a blog on The Atlantic website, Green writes that Penn has strong connections to Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, a person said to be in strong consideration as Sen. Barack Obama’s running mate.
Penn worked on Bayh’s 2004 campaign for re-election to the Senate.
Penn’s wife, Nancy Jacobson, is a longtime adviser to Bayh who put together a finance team for the senator in 2006 when he was exploring a presidential run. She’s also the founder of Third Way, a think tank. Bayh serves as one of the honorary Senate chairs for the group.
“Bayh is the one guy who could get Penn back in the mix,” a Democratic pollster told Green, a senior editor at the Atlantic who has written extensively about the Clinton campaign.
(Among other stories, Green was the author of a piece on the campaign that was controversially spiked earlier this year by GQ. Reports were that former president Bill Clinton said he wouldn’t appear in the magazine if the story ran.)
Green’s Atlantic story is based on leaked e-mails, many of which the magazine has posted on its website. Green depicts a campaign divided and adrift in the face of a surprisingly strong and well-financed opponent.
Penn is central the story, though Green does not say whether or not he is one of the e-mail leakers.
In one sense, the e-mails do Penn good, as they show that he had a clear game plan for Clinton, one that would portray her as an experienced leader with deep middle-class roots.
The strategy was eventually adopted, and it showed good results. However, by the time it was put in place, Obama had an insurmountable lead.
The e-mails also may do Penn harm, especially one from March 2007 in which he suggested that Obama, whose father was born in Kenya, is less American than Clinton.
“His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited,” Penn wrote. “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”
Penn did not recommend that the campaign attack Obama directly as un-American.
Rather, he urged that the campaign “own ‘American’ in (its) programs.”
“Make this a new American Century,” he continued. “…Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out.”
The rest of Clinton’s advisers don’t seem to have picked up on Penn’s insights. However, several writers have suggested that, consciously or unconsciously, Sen. John McCain’s campaign is echoing some of Penn’s suggestions.
Penn himself recently gave the McCain campaign credit for its ad depicting Obama as a celebrity along the lines of Paris Hilton.
“Fair or not, as advertising it did its job,” Penn wrote in Politico.com. “It used humor, stuck viewers with memorable images and created a debate.”
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment