Penn Steps Down: Let the Healing Begin

This month, the editors of The American Prospect published a pithy little piece (subscription required) about Mark Penn:

At this moment of tension and division within the Democratic Party, it's worth remembering that there are things that even the most sharp-elbowed insiders within the Clinton and Obama campaigns still agree on. Chiefly, they all loathe Mark Penn.

Hillary Clinton's chief strategist and pollster is hated and derided in the Obama camp and across a much broader swath of party leaders for his insistence on micro-triangulating policies and politics, his high-dollar arrogance, his (odd in a pollster) tone-deafness to public opinion. According to a story in The Washington Post, however, it turns out he's hated throughout Clinton's circle of friends and advisers for the very same things...Hillaryistas have repeatedly tried to persuade Hillary to fire Penn for, among other things, his unwillingness to embrace the idea that this is a change election...

So if, at this summer's Democratic convention, tensions between the Clinton and Obama camps reach fever pitch, convention chair Nancy Pelosi might want to entertain a motion that says, simply, "We hate Mark Penn." Nothing, apparently, could so quickly unify the party.

As I explained a few months ago, in Ickes and Penn, After School, Behind the Bike Racks, Harold Ickes—who's respected by a wide swath of the Democratic party, and has always been well to the left of most of the other members let in to the Clinton inner circle—despises Penn, and views him as a proxy for Dick Morris, whom Ickes has battled for over 40 years.  Ickes is probably happy about this:

"After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as Chief Strategist of the Clinton Campaign; Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign," Clinton Campaign Manager Maggie Williams said in a statement.

[As Ari Melber points out over at The Nation, Penn will still be raking in cash from the campaign, and still has conflicts of interest between his private sector clients and Hillary Clinton.]

Why the Clinton campaign would even keep him around is baffling; he has always sucked.  It's hard to find information about his past clients via Google searches, but he's on a tremendous losing streak, one that's rumored to be at least 13 straight.  I haven't been able to find anything he's won since Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection (in which Clinton didn't top 50%).  He polled for Al Checchi when Checchi lost the three-way CA gubernatorial primary to Jane Harman and eventual winner Gray Davis in 1998.  He got fired from the Gore campaign in 1999.  In 2002 his clients included Dem gubernatorial primary losers Jim Blanchard in Michigan and Andrew Cuomo in New York, and his candidate Jeanne Shaheen lost the 2002 NH Senate race (she's got a different pollster this time around).  In 2004 he polled for Joementum's presidential run and Peter Deutch's losing FL Senate primary against Betty Castor.  In 2006 he even polled for asshole Silvio Berlusconi, who in addition to being a far-right scumbag—did I mention he's a far-right scumbag?—was the sitting prime minister of Italy, and owned most of the Italian media!  (Check out this great "historical reenactment" of a Penn memo to Berlusconi.)

The post-mortems of the Clinton campaign, if they are to be useful, will have to explain why Hillary Clinton allowed Mark Penn to become her Svengali (or Rasputin?).  Furthermore, a full explanation of Bill and Hillary will need to explain why on her two signature executive endeavors—the Clinton health care effort and her Presidential campaign—they allowed people totally unsuited to the task to become Hillary's Svengalis.  

As some will remember, the Clinton health care plan was headed up by business consulting guru Ira Magaziner.  Brad DeLong had this to say about Magaziner's contribution to the Clinton health care debacle:

His second flaw was that he thought like a management consultant. A management consultant's principal goal is to win a debate in front of his employer, the senior decision maker, the "Principal." You win a debate by making intellectual arguments, controlling the flow of information to the senior decision maker, walling-off potential adversaries from the process, and winning the confidence of the Principal by telling him things that he likes to hear: that he is smart, that his goals can be achieved, that the nay-sayers just don't grasp the issues. But that's not how you develop a policy.

It's also not how you win an election.  As a candidate or an office holder, you need people around you who can and will tell you what you don't want to hear, and to whom you'll listen when you don't like what you're hearing.  She has tremendous talents, but based on her two biggest leadership challenges, it looks like Hillary Clinton is too susceptible to the charms of people who tell her what she wants to hear rather than what she needs to hear.  

Above I referred to a humorous "historical reenactment" of the communication between Penn and Berlusconi, which ran in the Washington Monthly two years ago.  Here's the final bullet point of that satire:

Final suggestion. I don't always recommend this, but denial can be a genuine ace-in-the-hole. If the numbers go against you, and if the courts rule against you, do not -- repeat, do not -- concede. Drag it out for several embarrassing weeks. Or just stay in office. That was my advice to Bob Mugabe.

That was a satire, but it's likely Penn has been making a similar argument to Clinton for months.  Let's hope she stops listening to him.  Let's hope that if she won't heed the words of Meteor Blades, that someone she will listen to, like Vernon Jordan, will tell her it's time to step aside and acknowledge that Barack Obama is our nominee. Then, Obama supporters, Clinton supporters, supporters of other candidates who've already stepped aside, indeed, all Democrats everywhere across our great land, then, let us come together around our shared loathing of Mark Penn, and let the healing begin.