By Greg Sargent - February 6, 2008
This one is worth keeping an eye on, because we'll be hearing more of it in the days ahead. In the Clinton campaign conference call I mentioned below, Hillary pollster Mark Penn repeatedly said Obama was becoming an "establishment candidate" -- a rather strained effort to use Obama's high-profile endorsements to weaken his insurgent appeal.
Asked about Obama's loss in Massachusetts despite the Teddy Kennedy endorsement, Penn again reiterated the fact that voters making up their minds on the last day had broken for Hillary, suggesting (without quite saying) that this was somehow catalyzed by Obama's new high-profile support.
"The more that Senator Obama has shifted to becoming an establishment campaign based on endorsements, people said, `You know, it's really Senator Clinton who has the ideas for change,'" Penn told reporters.
Again: Keep in mind that in advance of yesterday's contest, Hillary had a massive lead in Massachusetts for weeks. Anyway, we'll be hearing more of this.
Bill Clinton has already tried that
unbelievably lame argument, now Penn:
To help answer questions about a rash of killings by his employees in Iraq, Erik Prince, the founder and CEO of Blackwater, hired the PR and lobbying firm run by Hillary Clinton’s top campaign strategist, Mark Penn. Penn is the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, whose lobbying arm, BKSH, prepped Prince for his testimony.
linkAfter the 1994 election, Democrats had just lost both houses of Congress, and President Clinton was floundering in the polls. At the urging of his wife, he turned to Dick Morris, a friend from their time in Arkansas. Morris brought in two pollsters from New York, Doug Schoen and his partner, Mark Penn, a portly, combative workaholic. Morris decided what to poll and Penn polled it. They immediately pushed Clinton to the right, enacting the now-infamous strategy of "triangulation," which co-opted Republican policies like welfare reform and tax cuts and emphasized small-bore issues that supposedly cut across the ideological divide. "They were the ones who said, 'Make the '96 election about nothing except V-chips and school uniforms,'" says a former adviser to Bill. When Morris got caught with a call girl, Penn became the most important adviser in Clinton's second term. "In a White House where polling is virtually a religion," the Washington Post reported in 1996, "Penn is the high pri est."
Penn, who had previously worked in the business world for companies like Texaco and Eli Lilly, brought his corporate ideology to the White House. After moving to Washington he aggressively expanded his polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland (PSB). It was said that Penn was the only person who could get Bill Clinton and Bill Gates on the same line. Penn's largest client was Microsoft, and he saw no contradiction between working for both the plaintiff and the defense in what was at the time the country's largest antitrust case. A variety of controversial clients enlisted PSB. The firm defended Procter & Gamble's Olestra from charges that the food additive caused anal leakage, blamed Texaco's bankruptcy on greedy jurors and market-tested genetically modified foods for Monsanto. PSB introduced to consulting the concept of "inoculation": shielding corporations from scandal through clever advertising and marketing.
In 2000 Penn became the chief architect of Hillary's Senate victory in New York, persuading her, in a rerun of '96, to eschew big themes and relentlessly focus on poll-tested pothole politics, such as suburban transit lines and dairy farming upstate. Following that election, 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). A key player in the decision to hire Penn was Howard Paster, President Clinton's chief lobbyist to Capitol Hill and an influential presence inside WPP. "Clients of stature come to Mark constantly for counsel," says Paster, who informally advises Hillary, explaining the hire. The press release announcing Penn 's promotion noted his work "developing and implementing deregulation informational programs for the electric utilities industry and in the financial services sector." The release blithely ignored how utility deregulation contributed to the California electricity crisis manipulated by Enron and the blackout of 2003, which darkened much of the Northeast and upper Midwest.
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