Clinton campaign chief strategist Mark Penn sent the following memo out to media outlets today:
To: Interested Parties
From: The Clinton Campaign
Date: Friday, February 29, 2008
RE: Obama Must-Wins
The media has anointed Barack Obama the presumptive nominee and he's playing the part.
With an eleven state winning streak coming out of February, Senator Obama is riding a surge of momentum that has enabled him to pour unprecedented resources into Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont.
The Obama campaign and its allies are outspending us two to one in paid media and have sent more staff into the March 4 states. In fact, when all is totaled, Senator Obama and his allies have outspent Senator Clinton by a margin of $18.4 million to $9.2 million on advertising in the four states that are voting next Tuesday.
Senator Obama has campaigned hard in these states. He has spent time meeting editorial boards, courting endorsers, holding rallies, and - of course - making speeches.
If he cannot win all of these states with all this effort, there's a problem.
The plan began to take shape after Obama's Beltway blowout on February 12th. On February 13th, the day after Obama's landslide, Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson, and field director Guy Cecil held a damage-control conference call.
"From our perspective, we expect change to begin March 4th," Penn said. "The senator leads in the largest delegate-rich states remaining." Penn cited Texas’ large Latino population and Ohio’s middle-class, whom Penn believes have been responsive to Clinton’s economic policies, as two groups that have boosted her appeal in those states.
--snip--
Cecil noted that he expects even after the March 4th contests, Clinton will be locked in a "virtual tie" with Obama in the number of delegates possessed. He predicted just 25 delegates will separate the two nominees. The campaign added that superdelegate support will be essential to clinch the nomination. Superdelegates are officially unpledged party leaders and elected officials.
So we have conflicting expectations coming out of the Clinton camp. On February 13th, when Clinton was leading by 17 points in Ohio and 16 points in Texas, the expectation was that Clinton would win in these two state by large enough margins that after their primaries, the delegate contest would be a "virtual tie."
And now that Clinton's lead is down to single digits in Ohio and an underwhelming -4 points in Texas, Obama should be routing her because he is, WOW, using his resources.
Riiight.
Over the past few weeks, I have been more than a little irritated with the negative tone that the Clinton campaign has been taking. I have also been annoyed at the fact that Mark Penn has been allowed within 100 yards of that campaign, let alone allowed to run it. I, as do many, feel that Clinton's problems as of late are mostly due to the absolute incompetence of Mark Penn.
And this leads to the thing that has bothered me the most lately about Clinton's campaign. It is said that Bill Clinton himself was a master of the concept of "spin," taking an issue or event and offering an interpretation of it that puts it in a positive, or more realistically, less negative, light.
But with Penn and co. in charge of the spin room at the Clinton campaign, it has become a troubling trend that some issue is snapped up and thrown back at me as an insult to my intelligence.
Think of it this way: You learn something. You start thinking of ways to interpret it. Your mind takes a tentative step in each direction that your interpretation might lead to. Then you decide on how you interpret that something and take that step there and stay there.
Penn is an entirely different story. When choosing the interpretation he wants to peddle, he takes TEN GIANT LEAPS to the farthest, most weird thing he can think of, and tosses it back at me as a stinking pile of utter nonsense. Penn sucks at spinning. Spin is supposed to be believable.
And that's why the Clinton campaign is starting to descend into that running joke stage in the implosion of a campaign. This spin about Obama being supposed to win Ohio and Texas is horse shit-- and there isn't a single person that's going to believe it.
And with that, I leave you with something (that you've probably heard) that Bill Clinton said just nine days ago:
"If she wins Texas and Ohio I think she will be the nominee. If you don't deliver for her, I don't think she can be. It's all on you."