MARK PENN GONE.

From the inbox:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEApril 6, 2008Contact: Press Office, 703-875-1271press@hillaryclinton.comStatement from Maggie WilliamsAfter the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as Chief Strategist of the Clinton Campaign; Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign.Geoff Garin and Howard Wolfson will coordinate the campaign's strategic message team going forward.

Good for them. It might be too late, but it's a good move anyway. If this campaign does nothing else, it should destroy of the myth of Mark Penn's competence.Update: There are a couple ways to understand this release. One is that Penn is gone, or at least functionally neutered. The second is that he took a title change that will, in no way, affect his influence in the campaign. Given the hatred that exists for Penn among the rest of Hillary's campaign staff, odds are they're going to try make this operationally indistinguishable from being banished to another dimension, one from which either light nor sound can escape. Given Penn's traditional closeness to the Clinton's, he'll still have Hillary's cell number, and so it's possible he'll retain his influence by simply giving her a ring each morning. Or, given his traditional closeness to the Clinton's, it's possible that he'll a) be banished from the campaign but b) this won't matter because Penn is only on the campaign because Hillary Clinton agrees with him about American public policy and politics, and his real role is to simply amplify decisions she'll make anyway.But Penn's reputation is wrecked. His meeting with the Colombians wasn't a mere gaffe. it was pure greed. When Samantha Power called Hillary Clinton a monster, that was a gaffe. When Austen Goolsbee potentially told some Canadian friend that no one was going to end NAFTA, that was a gaffe (it was also true). Gaffes are accidents born of inexperience or exhaustion or poor judgment. Mark Penn, conversely, was simply doing his job as CEO of Burson-Marsteller -- a job he'd already been criticized for retaining, and which he already knew was under scrutiny. His meeting with the Colombians wasn't a mistake. It was a prescheduled business event that was supposed to make Mark Penn more money. Money that was more important to him than Hillary Clinton's opposition to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, and more important to him than spending those hours trying to make Hillary Clinton president so she could block that agreement. Insofar as he got caught and embarrassed the campaign, that was incompetence. But insofar as he took the meeting in the first place, that was prioritization -- prioritization of cash over candidate. And Mark Penn's other potential clients won't miss the implications.