It's fascinating to watch the knives come out in the Clinton campaign. Oddly, I actually think Mark Penn is right to say that he gets a bum rap among those who blame him for creating a microtargeted, small-bore effort. His book may have been abut microtrends, but the campaign he helped run really did stake its success on broad themes, large arguments, and big policies. It just hasn't been enough. Insofar as the campaign made big mistakes, they were tactical and organizational in nature. They didn't realize how long the primary would go on, and weren't ready to compete after Super Tuesday. They did a terrible job organizing in caucus states, and began opportunistically questioning the legitimacy of the process. They didn't control their surrogates, and let Bill Clinton, Mark Penn, and others trash Hillary's image by going too negative. Those were all errors, and some of them had a pretty large impact. If the campaign hadn't turned so many folks off in South Carolina, Obama may not have registered the win that revived his momentum after losing New Hampshire. But campaigns are, in the end, only as good as the candidate they furnish. Looking back, the campaign's biggest error was fielding a candidate who had legislated as if it were still the 90s, eschewing bold progressive leadership and capitulating to Republican pressure on "national security." If Clinton had spent any of the last few years using her star power to lead high profile fights on universal health care, presidential powers, global warming, or Iraq, she might be in a very different place today. She'd be able to make the contrast with Obama, point to where she'd been a workhorse and he'd proven a showhorse. But she didn't. And at the end of the day, that's not Mark Penn's fault, though it may have been his advice. It's Clinton's fault.
