Now that Worldwide President and CEO Now that Worldwide President and CEO Mark Penn has been blamed for the Clinton campaign debacle (Tom Edsall reports predictions that “Mark Penn is going to be thrown under the bus” for failing to foresee Clinton’s Iowa defeat), it seems worth pointing out that you read it here first. Along with Ezra Klein and Ari Berman of The Nation, this has been your go-to source for the case against Mark Penn for almost a year. But have any of us gotten that, “Hey, sorry, we should have listened to you…” call from the Clintonites? I can’t speak for Ezra or Ari, but I’m still waiting by the phone. While most attention was paid to the revelation here that the firm which Penn serves as Worldwide President and CEO (despite apparently working full-time on a political campaign, where that is not actually his title) had a division dedicated to helping corporate clients get rid of their union problems, we all really started by looking at Penn as a pollster and the kind of narrow politics he promoted. None of us could say for sure that the private advice that Penn offered to clients like Clinton and Microsoft was bad advice, because we have no way of knowing. Indeed, that was part of the problem -- most reputable pollsters have a public face as well as a private face, and their public assertions and data are testable against results. Not Penn. His modus operandi has been to announce that some vaguely defined sub-category is the key to the electorate -- soccer moms, office park dads, or the even more dubious “Archery Moms” and “Ardent Amazons” of his new book -- then design a centrist, cautious politics to appeal to that key group, and then two years later, define some other group as key. The results can never be tested or fully understood. It’s sales, not polling, and what he was selling was always an argument for a particular kind of politics: one focused on fairly well-off swing voters, women in particular. (Scott Lemieux posted earlier quoting my more substantive critique of Penn.) MORE...
