It's not just that Mark Penn, Union Buster has made a career out of slicing the electorate into arbitrary subgroups inevitably calculated to push the Democratic Party to the right and to focus on the interests of the affluent. It's also that he would seem to be completely incompetent (or, at least, so sloppy and tendentious that he might as well be.) Given that he's very likely to be a major adviser for the Democratic candidate for president in 2008, this strikes me as a serious problem. (Although maybe it also means that Clinton isn't the near-mortal lock I believe her to be...) --Scott Lemieux
