I, for one, could never have predicted that Mark Penn's a racist:
Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic.The piece goes on to provide more details for the now familiar story of a Clinton campaign that (a) didn't think about the delegate game until much too late and (b) was so wracked with in-fighting that it wasn't able to respond effectively until it was much too late.The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? ... Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?”
I wonder about the political ramifications of the timing here. Obviously, this piece would have been immensely damaging to the Clinton campaign if released in April or May, but by now the wounds of the primary season have been patched up surprisingly well. A number of the people mentioned in the piece (like Neera Tanden and Patti Solis Doyle) are even paid Obama staffers. I'm not even so sure this will hurt Clinton's chances of a spot on the nomination ballot in Denver. With any luck, the piece will prevent Mark Penn from being hired by any campaign, ever, but then again it will probably blow over by the 2010 cycle, leading some poor Senate or gubernatorial candidates to pay the man to help them lose. I just can't see the revelations here, damning though they are, having any real impact.
