The mark of a world-class horse's ass is not just engineering a colossal defeat out of all the elements of victory, as he did with Hillary Clinton's candidacy, but to keep pestering us with his expertise, as Mark Penn is now doing in praising the Britney Spears-Paris Hilton ad of the McCain campaign.
"Fair or not," Penn pontificates, "as advertising it did its job: It used humor, stuck viewers with memorable images and created a debate."
After the autopsy of his botched management of the Clinton campaign in the current Atlantic, Penn should be skulking off to pitch some banana republic to replace his lobbying work for Colombia, which finally got him fired as Hillary's mastermind.
But Penn is obviously still frustrated enough by his failure to smear Obama enough in the primaries to be cheerleading for the Republicans to continue the work and justify his genius for poisoning the political process.
Or maybe it's just that Obama isn't doing enough to raise money for the Clinton campaign to pay off its debts to him for his monumental service.
Showing posts with label Mark Penn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Penn. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Sunday, June 08, 2008
The Mastermind Speaks!
Mark Penn, the chief strategist who did more than anyone to kill Hillary Clinton's campaign, is copping a plea. In today's New York Times, he explains that "it wasn't the message--it was the money" (the lack of it, he means) that did her in.
After the Bay of Pigs, JFK cited the old saying, "Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan." But Penn's paternity of Clinton failure's is too well-established for denial, so the next best thing is to claim that the foundling died of malnutrition.
Aside from Penn's own culpability in misspending the campaign funds, starting with the decision to ignore Iowa until it was too late, his fingerprints are on everything that went wrong--from the hubris of acting as if the nomination was a done deal to not seeing that the race was about change rather than experience ("ready from Day One").
It was only when Penn was fired in early April for embarrassing the candidate by meeting with Colombia's ambassador to the US about a bilateral free-trade agreement, a pact Clinton opposes, that she started winning primaries and closing the gap with Obama.
Early in the campaign, someone had to explain to the genius that primary delegates are awarded proportionally, not "winner take all." This did not daunt Penn, who discovered "soccer moms" (talk about sexism) during Bill Clinton's reelection and makes a specialty of slicing and dicing voters into demographic slivers such as "young knitters", "extreme commuters", "tech fatales" (women who like technology) and "powerful petites" (women who are small and proud of it).
Now he can discover a new population subset--moronic manipulators.
The largest portion of the Clinton campaign's unpaid debt is owed to Penn. They should demand a discount, and Barack Obama should look for a way around the financing rules to send him a check as a thank-you.
After the Bay of Pigs, JFK cited the old saying, "Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan." But Penn's paternity of Clinton failure's is too well-established for denial, so the next best thing is to claim that the foundling died of malnutrition.
Aside from Penn's own culpability in misspending the campaign funds, starting with the decision to ignore Iowa until it was too late, his fingerprints are on everything that went wrong--from the hubris of acting as if the nomination was a done deal to not seeing that the race was about change rather than experience ("ready from Day One").
It was only when Penn was fired in early April for embarrassing the candidate by meeting with Colombia's ambassador to the US about a bilateral free-trade agreement, a pact Clinton opposes, that she started winning primaries and closing the gap with Obama.
Early in the campaign, someone had to explain to the genius that primary delegates are awarded proportionally, not "winner take all." This did not daunt Penn, who discovered "soccer moms" (talk about sexism) during Bill Clinton's reelection and makes a specialty of slicing and dicing voters into demographic slivers such as "young knitters", "extreme commuters", "tech fatales" (women who like technology) and "powerful petites" (women who are small and proud of it).
Now he can discover a new population subset--moronic manipulators.
The largest portion of the Clinton campaign's unpaid debt is owed to Penn. They should demand a discount, and Barack Obama should look for a way around the financing rules to send him a check as a thank-you.
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