Leave the Kids Alone (By Mark Penn)

[Melidoperez]

September 3, 2008,
The New York Times

Mark J. Penn was the chief adviser to Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential election and to Hillary Rodham Clinton in her Senate and presidential races.

Having been through the partisan wars over impeachment in 1998 as an adviser to Bill Clinton, I have a pretty good idea about how politics and personal lives can get tangled up. And the personal lives of potential presidents, especially when running for the first term, are important factors, along with their experience, ideas, vision and values. But the personal lives of their underage children? That is a bridge too far.

On Tuesday, the mainstream media, which never looked into allegations against John Edwards that turned out to be true and might have affected the race, splashed the personal life of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter onto virtually every front page, including this paper’s — even going as far as to cloak the details in news articles about the vice presidential vetting process.

But the media doesn’t deserve all the blame for this growing tendency to report on the personal lives of a candidate’s children. Some of the voters and the candidates themselves have also played a role.

Read more: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/03/leave-the-kids-alone/

[Forkboy]

1. Fuck him.

[jules1962]

11. ya know

Sarah thinks it is sporting to shoot wolves from helicopters and that polar bears should not be on the endangered list. I will have compassion for her when she shows some for these beautiful animals that she is blood thirsty for.

[melody]

2. As soon as the bitch leaves my civil rights alone nt

[Stellabella]

5. Exactly.

If she wasn't so frigging nosy about every other woman's vagina, we'd leave her alone. She set the bar.

These people remind me of a 3-year old who pours salt all over your food and then whines 'don't do it back!!'

[az chela]

3. palin is the one that is paradeing the kids around

everyone in the family passes the baby on like a sack of flour.They are exploting him as much as they can

[Melidoperez]

4. Do candidates' children usually stay home?

I haven't watched many conventions. Don't candidates' children usually go to the convention?

[torbird]

6. Fuck You, Mark

If you were better at this whole "politics" thing, your candidate, Hillary Clinton (remember her? She's the nice lady who paid you millions of dollars for shitty advice, asshole) would have won the nomination. Thank GOD she didn't, though, because we'd be listening to even more of your shitty advice right now.

Are you really so fucking stupid that you can't grasp that without concrete examples of their failure, Republicans cannot be proven wrong? If talking about the VICE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE'S failure to live up to her self-proclaimed "family values" platform isn't appropriate, then issues are meaningless.

Issues, Mark -- you dumb fuck -- are not hypothetical. They have real consequences. Sarah Palin knows that, now. Do you?

[Alcibiades]

7. He's a bad writer

Did this man graduate from college? Did he write this in five minutes or less? Does he have some sort of profound learning disability? Was this ghost-written by a middle schooler?

What's even more shocking to me than Penn's poor skills as a writer is the low quality of copy editing at the NYT. You'd think they would run these blog entries by somebody.

The media may have treated Edwards with kid gloves because, oh, I don't know, maybe because his wife has terminal cancer? If Penn wants to blame anybody for the increased sexual scrutiny, perhaps he should blame Bill Clinton, whose antics led to the overemphasis on sex in politics, or Newt and Ken, whose pursuit of Clinton led to a nonstop media circus for the latter half of Clinton's second term?

It's great that Penn is getting paid by the supposedly liberal NYT to defend Palin. Now I understand this man's ineptitude at running a Democratic primary campaign: he really does thin like a Republican.

[Tutonic]

8. Until that fat pile of dough can bend over and kiss his own ass he

needs to move along.

[yurbud]

9. stumblefuck tells competent how to run a campaign

[crimsonblue]

10. eat shit and die

you fat worthless fuck. You single handedly destroyed your candidate's campaign, and now you want to destroy Obama's with your whisper accusations of him injecting family into the GE, even though Obama has REPEATEDLY stated that family is off limits. Choke on a fucking canoli.

[BridgeTheGap]

12. Analysis: GOP contradicts self on Palin family

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/cvn_measure_of_a_nation_palin_family_politics