Oh boy, there is an article coming soon to be published in the "Atlantic Monthly", where Mark Penn advises Hillary Clinton to "portray Barack Obama as having a "limited" connection "to basic American values and culture," according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic."
This article will also talk about the "circular firing squads, poor conference calls, and the lack of leadership from Hillary herself in getting her team on track.
Was she really ready to lead ?? Was she really ready to lead the nation as a "true" progressive ??
More from the forthcoming artcle :
Atlantic Senior Editor Joshua Green writes that major decisions during her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination would be put off for weeks until suddenly Clinton "would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire."
Green reports that on a staff conference call in January where Clinton received "little response" or "silence" to several of her suggestions for how to recover from the Iowa loss and do better in New Hampshire, "Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes," Green recounts. "‘This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,’ she snapped, and hung up."
The eight-page blockbuster, "The Front-Runner’s Fall," draws on internal memos, e-mails and meeting notes to reveal what the magazine’s September issue calls "the backstabbing and conflicting strategies that produced an epic meltdown."
Mark Penn is a real sweetheart :
Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article:
"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."
What ???!!! Barack Obama, not "American in his thinking and in his values" ??
Barack Obama, the man with a wife and 2 children and barely bought his first home and just paid off his student loans ?
Yes, he's soooo scary...
Let's see here. Uh Mark Penn is it ?
Okay :
Penn became a very rich man--and an even more valued commodity in the business world (Hillary paid him $1 million for her re-election campaign in '06 and $277,000 in the first quarter of this year). The massive PR empire WPP Group acquired Penn's polling firm for an undisclosed sum in 2001 and four years later named him worldwide CEO of one of its most prized properties, the PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M).
Burson-Marsteller is hardly a natural fit for a prominent Democrat. The firm has represented everyone from the Argentine military junta to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which thousands were killed when toxic fumes were released by one of its plants, to Royal Dutch Shell, which has been accused of massive human rights violations in Nigeria. B-M pioneered the use of pseudo-grassroots front groups, known as "astroturfing," to wage stealth corporate attacks against environmental and consumer organizations. It set up the National Smokers Alliance on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s. Its current clients include major players in the finance, pharmaceutical and energy industries. In 2006, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57 percent of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates.
A host of prominent Republicans fall under Penn's purview. B-M's Washington lobbying arm, BKSH & Associates, is run by Charlie Black, a leading GOP operative who maintains close ties to the White House, including Karl Rove, and was former partners with Lee Atwater, the political consultant who crafted the Willie Horton smear campaign used by George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Black regularly disparages the Clintons; he has called Hillary a "martyr figure" and said Bill "tearfully embraced...government preferences for [a] homosexual lifestyle." In recent years Black's clients have included the likes of Iraq's Ahmad Chalabi, the darling of the neocon right in the run-up to the war; Lockheed Martin; and Occidental Petroleum. In the summer of 2005 he landed a contract with the Lincoln Group, the disgraced PR firm that covertly placed US military propaganda in Iraqi news outlets. The agreement, according to Intelligence Online, allowed the Lincoln Group to "tap into BKSH's extensive contacts in the Republican administration." When asked by The New Yorker if there was too much cronyism in Iraq, Black responded, "I just wish I could find the cronies."
Black is only one cannon in B-M's Republican arsenal. Its "grassroots" lobbying branch, Direct Impact--which specializes in corporate-funded astroturfing--is run by Dennis Whitfield, a former Reagan Cabinet official, and Dave DenHerder, the political director of the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign in Ohio.
Yeah.. Ohio ?? 2004 ?? Anyone ??
Now I digress back to Hillary and her campaign :
"The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men," Green writes. "[H]er advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. ...
[S]he never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel.
This last sentence is very telling :
"What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make."
Now reviewing all the evidence; would Clinton have been a leader or knowing the connections and ties that Mark Penn has and influence he has with the Clintons, would she have been led ??
What would have really happened at 3am ??