I suppose I should feel vindicated that Mark Penn's downfall as "Chief Strategist" of Senator Clinton's presidential campaign came on a question of conflict of interest involving one of his other elevated titles, that of "Worldwide President and CEO" of the public relations giant Burson-Marsteller.
After all, a little over a year ago, I noticed that the Burson-Marsteller website featured a division promising "a comprehensive communications approach for clients when they face any type of labor situation," which is a polite way of saying, if your company has one of those nasty unions demanding fair pay or benefits, we can make those problems go away. The website was quickly scrubbed, but Ezra Klein saved a screenshot and wrote about it, and Ari Berman at The Nation did some deeper reporting into what Burson-Marsteller actually did for its union-busting clients, such as Cintas. Eventually, a few labor leaders complained directly to Clinton, and while the Chief Strategist survived, by the time the news came around that he had met with Colombian officials as part of Burson-Marsteller's contract to promote a controversial U.S. trade deal with that country, there was no second chance.
But it wasn't really conflicts of interest that I was after last March. Yes, I was curious how Penn could hold three high-powered jobs at once. (He is also the head of the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland, a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller.) But I was more interested in the nature of Penn's advice, his polling, and the kind of politics he promoted -- questions much bigger than a conflict of interest or a mistaken meeting.
Clinton's bond with Penn, we're told, goes back to the 1995 to 96 period, when Dick Morris brought in Penn to help with President Clinton's reelection effort. While it was a success for the Clinton family, it was a dreary low point for the nation's politics: Voter turnout dipped below 50 percent for the only time ever in a presidential year, young people were completely disengaged, campaign finance scandals arose in part because politics was so uninspiring that no one would give except in exchange for favors, and the ambitions of the early Clinton years were abandoned for safe, symbolic gestures appealing to the middle-class swing voters -- "soccer moms" -- in a few swing states.
And Penn sold the same narrow and narrowing brand of politics at every point for the last twelve years. The names changed: soccer moms became office-park dads, and this year they have been relabeled "security moms." But the formula is always the same: There is a single group of (white, middle-aged, middle-class) voters who decide the election, all the rest is constant, and the key to the election is appealing to that group with limited, essentially conservative messages.
The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut assured us yesterday that Penn's vice was that he "was too data-driven," just as she earlier reported that he "likes to swim in a sea of data." Whether he was swimming in it or not, he certainly missed what the data would have shown were enormous changes since 1996: Huge increases in participation as well as partisanship, all of which make the focus on swing voters less relevant. A voting public, particularly in Democratic primaries, that is more liberal, more open to ambitious policies and overwhelmingly anti-war. And an overarching desire for change, which made the message of safety, experience and inevitability the wrong one for 2008.
But Penn's certainty about his answers could never be tested, in part because his categories were tenuous and shifting. What is a "security mom"? It's whatever Penn says it is. And unlike real pollsters such as Geoff Garin of Garin-Hart Research, who replaced Penn on the campaign, or Stan Greenberg, who was Bill Clinton's original pollster, both of whom make vast amounts of data and analysis available to the public, Penn almost never shows his work. Last year, in the course of writing a piece on Penn as a pollster, I could find only one publicly available Penn, Schoen and Berland poll -- a 2002 poll from which he drew conclusions about "office park dads" based on a tiny subsample. In his endless stream of memos to the press this campaign cycle, Penn displayed remarkable innumeracy about statistical significance, and cherry-picked from publicly available polls, but almost never cited anything from his own "sea of data." One hopes that his private advice to the campaign was better informed, but there's no reason to think it was.
Penn's ultimate conflict was not between his role in the Clinton campaign and his private interests, although that was his downfall. It was between jobs number two and three: the pollster and the PR guy. Whether there was ever a empirically serious pollster inside that rumpled shirt or not, it was long ago overtaken by the conventions of public relations, which hold that spin creates it's own reality. For the entire election cycle, what Penn has been selling is spin, not strategy. From July 2, 2006, when he and James Carville published a mostly data-free op-ed entitled "The Power of Hillary," which contains within it the seeds of virtually every memo or soundbite of the subsequent campaign, what Penn has been selling is not a strategy for a Clinton win, but the -- hopefully self-reinforcing -- idea that she will win.
When inevitability was shattered in Iowa, rather than rearming the campaign with a message and a strategy appropriate to a respected, well-known senator running a competitive race for the Democratic nomination, he simply kept pushing the same button, so that "inevitable" eventually became "plausible," or transformed into one of the dozen bizarre calculations about how Clinton "would" be winning if only certain states were counted, or "should" be winning if voters and delegates were considering other factors. Spinning "inevitability" led to the claim that only Clinton passed "the Commander-in-Chief threshold," which in turn forced Clinton to exaggerate her entirely sufficient experience in foreign policy into something close to combat experience in Bosnia, an exaggeration that has been deeply damaging.
A few weeks ago, a prominent political scientist and Democratic strategist chided me for my focus on Penn. "A candidate gets the kind of campaign he or she deserves," he said. I was a bit surprised, as he is a strong Clinton supporter. And, sure, Clinton is responsible for Penn, just as George W. Bush is responsible for Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. The fact that she placed such trust in him, when his shortcomings are as obvious from a distance as they apparently are up close, is one factor that makes one doubt her. But, no, I don't believe that Clinton "deserves" Mark Penn, just as the country doesn't deserve the kind of narrowing, spin-driven politics he delivers. Clinton deserves the kind of campaign that a competent, empirical strategist or pollster like Geoff Garin will devise. Sadly, she deserved it six months ago.
