RE: PENN'S PROTEGES. I'd be a bit cautious with grouping all members of a polling firm in with one another. For instance, Garance is certainly right that a former VP of Penn, Schoen, and Berland is currently working for Edwards. But the pollster in question. David Ginsberg, was also a key member of the Gore-Lieberman campaign, which Penn was...fired from. So at least in the Gore campaign's eyes, there's some daylight there. And Penn has never been involved in a campaign even moderately like Edwards. That's actually why this matters: Penn's ideology is clearly expressed in his candidates' actions. He's not just a numbers cruncher with some personal opinions, but a powerful strategist who uses the numbers -- and like-minded clients -- to advance his worldview. Thus, his involvement in a candidacy actually reveals something about the candidate and the campaign's likely direction, and serves as a particularly important data point during the traditional leftward swing candidates make in primaries. For that reason, I tend to think the critique of Penn is limited to Penn, and to some degree, his partner, Doug Schoen. The two of them have been very upfront in their ideology and left a long, often joint, record of public statements and policy pronouncements. It would be imprecise, however, to paint all members of their polling firm with the same brush. There should be an innocent-until-proven-guilty approach here. On a more humorous note, I was reading a profile of Penn and Schoen from 1980 -- which includes the tidbit that they did polling for Republicans like John Anderson and Alexander Haig -- wherein the writer gushes that, "Penn & Schoen handled the computer processing, too. Now they own their own computer." Whoa! --Ezra Klein
