Sadly, my bit on Hardball wasn't anywhere near the most compelling portion of the show. That came a few segments before, when Joe Trippi, Mark Penn, and David Axelrod (the chief strategists behind the Edwards, Clinton, and Obama campaigns, respectively) squared off. It was, for my money, the most arresting segment of political television I've seen since the campaign started. Notice, among other things, that Trippi and Penn are standing in the same room, and Trippi clearly finds Penn an almost unbearable repulsive presence. Notice that Penn is the only man on earth more disheveled than Trippi, making Trippi, for once, "sheveled." Notice how everything Penn says ends up sounding like a plaintive, "but they started it." Notice that Axelrod comes off almost seeming like a statesman. Notice that consultants, in general, seem a little loathsome, as it's simply weird to hear people speak in message, rather than in more traditional languages, like "conversation." Politicians are good at making message sound like conversation, but consultants are not. They just make it sound like bullshit.
My hunch, right now, is that if Clinton goes down, Penn is going to be blamed. You can see the knives coming out already, but he really does a poor job here, and he's hampered not merely by his shortcomings as a speaker, but by the absence of message within the Clinton campaign. When the rationale for your campaign is that you're the frontrunner with the experience to win, losing your lead in the polls doesn't only put you in second place, it actually shreds the argument for your candidacy. What we're beginning to see here is how underdeveloped the arguments for Clinton were when separated from her aura of inevitability.
