In general, I’m very, very hard on Mark Penn. I think his politics are odious, his business dealings reprehensible, and his professional work shoddy beyond measure. And now, watching him desperately try and squirm away from the Clinton campaign while it’s still going on, I wonder if I’ve been too easy on the guy. From The LA Times: “Penn said in an e-mail over the weekend that he had ‘no direct authority in the campaign,’ describing himself as merely ‘an outside message advisor with no campaign staff reporting to me.'” Of course, he wasn’t complaining, or writing furious e-mails to correct the record, last April, when the Washington Post reported, “Penn, 53, is [Clinton’s] chief strategist. While not her campaign manager in name, Penn controls the main elements of her campaign.” Now he’s not only abandoning her, but by talking to reporters about campaign dissension mere days before Ohio, he’s stepping all over her message. If the e-mail was accidental, that makes him incompetent. If not, it makes him cravenly opportunistic.

Ezra Klein is a former Prospect writer and current editor-in-chief at Vox. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Guardian, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Slate, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He’s been a commentator on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and more.