Just to get folks up to speed, Mark Penn is Hillary Clinton's pollster and chief strategist. Penn began his career working for Republicans. Republican pollster and strategist Dick Morris brought Penn into Bill Clinton's orbit, where he eventually became Bill Clinton's lead strategist, and after 2000, Hillary's lead strategist as well.
Penn has generally been recognized as a DLC centrist during his time with the Clintons. Obviously, real Democrats have never much liked the guy, but events brought to light recently have brought things to a much higher level of disgust. At the beginning of May, Ari Berman in The Nation published an amazing expose of Penn.
Ezra Klein at The American Prospect noticed that Berman's piece included the detail that Penn's PR firm that had been making him rich had a union-busting division! To repeat, the lead strategist to the leading Democratic contender for the 2008 nomination was getting rich helping corporations stop union drives!
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OK. That should bring us all up to speed on who Mark Penn is. And I suppose one could make the case that who cares if Hillary has chosen to make her chief strategist a man who has gotten rich busting unions - his livelihood is separate from his work on her campaign, or something. But in the last few days, we've learned some very disturbing revelations on what Mark Penn has been doing in his role as Hillary's chief strategist.
Over the past few days, we've learned about push polling that Penn has been conducting against Edwards and Obama. Ben Smith at The Politico has an excellent roundup:
Dan Comly, a technical writer and Democratic activist, was at home in Portsmouth, N.H., on April 4 when he took a call for the most detailed political poll he had ever participated in.
"Wow, this is really cool (that) someone's taking the time to ask about these issues," he recalls thinking. "Then they started specifically comparing candidates," he says, asking whether his views would be altered by Barack Obama's relative lack of national experience, or by John Edwards' background as a wealthy trial lawyer.
So after Comly got off the phone, he did what any 21st-century Democratic activist would do: He went to his favorite liberal blog, My Left Wing, and wrote about the questions, which "began to make me queasy. Someone was trying to bash John Edwards and Barack Obama, and pitch Hillary."
Comly's April post was one of four recent blogged reports about what appear to be surveys by Hillary Rodham Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn.
The surveys, according to bloggers' sometimes imperfect memories, test voters' reactions to a variety of positive claims about Clinton and negative claims about her opponents. Two Iowa Democrats, Jason Eness-Potter and Ellen Ballas, told The Politico they had been asked in late May and early June, respectively, about John Edwards' $400 haircut.
Another New Hampshire Democrat, David Kulju, wrote on DailyKos that he was asked Sunday about a New York Times article raising questions about Edwards' work on poverty -- the same day the Times story ran.
So while John Edwards is out there talking about universal health care and standing up for Democrats, Hillary Clinton is bashing Democrats by letting loose her anti-progressive rabid dog, Mark Penn, to try to slime them under the radar.
But perhaps Democrats don't like seeing the presumptive nominee slime other Democrats by acting like a Republican:
Freeman Ng, a software designer in Oakland, Calif., reported getting a call late in the morning of May 5.
He wrote on DailyKos that day that he was asked how the fact that "Barack Obama failed to vote in favor of abortion rights nine times as a state senator" might affect his vote.
He said he was also asked a question that associated Edwards with tax hikes.
"A lot of the statements struck me as being very conservative and moderate in orientation, like the tax thing," said Ng, who stands well to the left of center. "To me, that was a plus that he's going to raise my taxes."
Ng, like other respondents interviewed, was angered by the negativity of the questions from a caller who said he was from PSA Interviewing, which runs Penn's Denver call center.
"I was really pissed," he said.
Similarly, Eness-Potter, an Iowa nursing student who spoke to a pollster in April -- and whose conversation was reported on the Iowa Independent website -- said the experience had turned him off Clinton.
He spoke to a caller while washing dishes in his Iowa City home, and he said he ended the call after the question about Edwards' haircut.
"I'm pretty much ending my support for Hillary altogether here," he recalled telling the caller. "He apologized and said, 'Can we continue with the poll?'" Eness-Potter declined.
Damn straight. Maybe Democrats don't want to nominate a candidate like Hillary who lets loose her union-busting chief strategist to act like a Republican and slime other Democrats. Maybe we want someone who stands with us.
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In contrast, while Hillary was peddling her under the radar attacks against other Democrats, John Edwards went on Hardball to attack Ann Coulter and the crazies of the right-wing. As Edwards said, they're not the mainstream. We are! If we're willing to stand up for what we believe in, rather than accepting the DLC half-measures of Hillary Clinton.
And it's worth noting that in his Hardball appearance, Edwards went out of his way to defend both Hillary and Obama from Coulter's slurs. Some candidates stand proudly with Democrats, and some candidates hire union-busters to slime Democrats.
Check it out: