Mark Penn, who is credited with — and in many quarters blamed for — being Senator Hillary’s chief strategist in Campaign 2008 has been ousted from the Clinton campaign amid a growing furor over conflict of interest allegations involving his lobbying for a Columbia trade agreement that the Senator opposes.
There must be high-fives tonight in parts of the Clinton campaign infrastructure: reports have noted that many top Clintonistas felt Penn had given the Senator lousy advice and had not really had much experience running a campaign at this level. So, in reality, his departure could be a turning point — a turning up for the Clinton campaign, or a turning down.
But is he totally departing? News reports suggest he’s stepping down but will still be in close touch with Clinton and the campaign — raising the issue as to whether he’s stepping down to lower the political heat or truly out as a key campaign adviser:
Mr. Penn, who has been associated with Mrs. Clinton and former President Bill Clinton for a dozen years, has come under withering criticism for continuing to consult with clients as chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, the international lobbying and public relations firm.
He has also been held responsible for the flawed electoral strategy considered partly responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s difficult political position, trailing Senator Barack Obama by more than a hundred delegates and with a very narrow path to winning the Democratic nomination.
In a terse statement, Maggie Williams, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, said, “After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as chief strategist of the Clinton campaign.”
His polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign, the statement said.
The bottom line is that the Clinton campaign has been buffeted with problems in recent weeks, and criticism over Penn was growing. And, according to ABC News, the Clintons were not happy, either:
Sources said that the Clintons were angry to learn about Penn’s work, especially because they had been told that Penn had recused himself from controversial clients and would restrict his private work.
This hasn’t been a good week for Penn. He was fired twice in a week:
Though Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams said, “After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as chief strategist of the Clinton campaign,” sources told ABC News Penn was pushed.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on Friday that Penn, who also is chief executive of the lobbying and public relations firm Burson-Marsteller Worldwide, had been hired by the Colombian government to help secure a trade deal.
On Saturday, the Colombian government said it was firing Penn’s firm after he said through the Clinton campaign that his consultations with Colombian officials were “an error in judgment that will not be repeated, and I am sorry for it.”
Clinton spoke about her opposition to the Colombia trade deal last week in her speech to the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia, and on Saturday seven labor unions that are part of the “Change to Win” coalition called for Clinton to fire Penn.
In a breathtakingly tight race such as this, the Clintons could ill-afford to face mounting criticism and labor union ire. Newsday has some more tidbits about the firing:
Penn – who infuriated many other Clinton advisers by refusing to quit his private-sector job during the campaign — was given his walking papers by the angry Clintons over the weekend, according to campaign insiders.
“They made it clear it was time for him to go,” said one top staffer on condition of anonymity. “So he did the honorable thing.” Sources told Newsday that the Colombia story was the last straw for Bill Clinton, a longtime Penn defender who had for months resisted calls to replace the pollster after a series of embarrassing episodes and questionable advice.
Penn’s duties will now be divided between Geoff Garin, another pollster, and communications chief Howard Wolfson, who had sharply disagreed with Penn’s strategy of downplaying Clinton’s softer, maternal side. “After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up the role of Chief Strategist,” Williams wrote in an e-mail to reporters at 6:40 p.m. last night.
….The ouster – while celebrated by many inside the campaign as an overdue housecleaning — comes at a bad time for Clinton, who trails Barack Obama in overall delegates and has watched her lead slip ahead of the make-or-break Pennsylvania primary. In February, Clinton hired longtime adviser Maggie Williams to replace campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, who was faulted for lavish spending and inadequate preparation for the Iowa caucuses.
The Huffington Post’s Dyan Loewe has a long piece detailing the criticism of Penn. Here’s just a small part of it:
Penn presided over a top-down campaign in which, to the surprise of most observers, he was responsible for both crafting the message and polling its effectiveness. Normally frowned upon, such an approach often leads to self-fulfilling polling that validates the assumptions of the strategist, rather than providing an objective assessment. Perhaps that is the best explanation for a series of horribly misguided message strategies that Penn employed.
There was the now infamous inevitability argument, a message that ramped expectations to heights that Clinton could never have expected to meet. There was the change vs. experience message, one that helped validate Obama’s persona as the change candidate. And of course, when times got tough, there was the “Let’s get real” message. Showing a clear sign that the campaign did not understand its opponent, this message criticized Obama supporters rather than Obama himself, driving the wedge further between the candidate and the voters she needed to persuade.
And, he writes, there were other decisions the proved not to be stellar:
But Penn chose not to confine his incompetence strictly to messaging, allowing it to invade all parts of the campaign strategy. His decision to forego caucus states demonstrated a glaring misunderstanding of the delegate allocation process. In a system in which losses must be minimized and wins inflated, Penn surrendered essential turf. It is equally surprising that someone who perceived his candidate as having enormous weaknesses in caucuses would have steered the campaign directly into the Iowa caucus. Had Deputy Campaign Manager Mike Henry’s recommendation been adopted — that Clinton forego Iowa — she may well have earned the nomination months ago.
With only a few months to go in the crucial remaining primaries, it will now be fascinating to see what kind of approach the Clinton campaign takes in its epic battle with Senator Barack Obama. Will the gloves come off (although at this point the gloves are already boxing gloves)? Will there be a more cohesive campaign operation, now that someone reports described as unpopular within the campaign is out?
In reality, the Clintons wisely and resolutely did quick damage. The key question now becomes: how will change the Clinton campaign — and how quickly?
HERE’S A SAMPLING OF WEBLOG REACTION:
Mark Penn would one day step aside from the Clinton campaign has been, as they say in sociology, overdetermined for a while. He had few allies inside the campaign, he was subject to withering criticism in the press, and he simply refused to give up his outside work, some of which conflicted with Sen. Clinton’s policy positions.
After Thursday’s disclosure in the Wall Street Journal that Penn had met with the Columbian government about its trade agreement, Clinton’s aides were put in the position of not being able to come up with a defense for Penn; he had done the indefensible. For Clinton, who has tolerated Penn’s public errors in judgment because she believed in his strategy, it was the last straw.
Did Hillary know about Penn’s conflict of interest and if so, how long has she known? If he wasn’t ‘found out’, would Penn still be in charge? Hillary already has a credibility problem, and this mess only adds fuel to the fire. She can’t be trusted. Watch for this to be THE major issue for the Obama campaign this week.
In the end, though, the big scandal is the $10 million that Penn made from the Hillary campaign while essentially steering it into the shoals. Hillary had expected to win this nomination in a cakewalk, and yet got derailed by a candidate with even less experience in national office than she has. Even a year after his entry into the race, Penn never quite recognized the call for change outweighed the desire for a Clinton Restoration. The millions of dollars Hillary spent on his advice could just as easily been burned for heat.
The current leadership in Columbia, under Alvaro Uribe, has been one of our most consistent allies in South America. One of the two Democrat contenders for President is firing people for working on a treaty with Columbia. Is this how Democrats plan to rebuild America’s image in the word?
It should be noted that Penn will still be doing work for the campaign, so perhaps this is just cosmetic, but anything at this point to put distance between him and the campaign is welcome, although months too late in my opinion.
—Talk Left’s Big Tent Democrat (one of the best pro-Hillary bloggers on the Internet):
Hallelujah! CNN reports Mark Penn is out of the Clinton campaign. Hooray!!
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…
…. 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.
He ended up quitting over the Columbian trade mess, ironically, and not for the toxic campaign he was waging on behalf of Hillary. Still, he’ll be behind the scenes. Karl Rove’s evil child.
The chances of Hillary Clinton quitting before the voting is over is nil – Bill Clinton is off to Puerto Rico on Monday.
But with the departure of Mark Penn from formal leadership the Hillary campaign, resigning as chief strategist, it suddenly doesn’t seem unthinkable that Hillary Clinton might throw in the towel before the Democratic convention in Denver.
With this move, Hillary gave the unions de facto authority to fire her campaign staff. Lefties of various sorts have complained about Penn since the beginning of Hillary’s campaign; the ultra-connected consultant has had a bulls-eye on his back since day one. Hillary (and presumably Bill) stuck with him because they felt that his pugnacious, poll-watching, methodical manner was the best bet to getting the nomination. With only a few states remaining, it’s a little late for a new and different approach. This was the candidate knuckling under to outside forces howling over the chief strategist’s misdeed….If a faction outside the Clintons’ inner circle can force her hand on Penn, then they can force her hand on departing the race… when the time is right.
—And, yes I DO take it personally:
mark penn is not a nice man… however, even with his resignation, the fact that he will “continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign” tells me that the resignation is purely cosmetic…however, whether penn is still helping hrc or not, hrc’s credibility, already circling the drain, is going to take another hard blow with this, and rightfully so…
Like her dismissal of Patti Solis Doyle as campaign manager, this is months too late for Clinton to catch Barack Obama. And, probably too late to totally undo damage in Pennsylvania.
For additional weblog reaction GO HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.