Josh Patashnik takes issue with Mark Schmitt's article on Mark Penn's demotion from his role as chief strategist of the Clinton campaign:
Whatever one wants to say about Hillary Clinton's campaign, it's not characterized by a "limited, essentially conservative" message. From a policy standpoint, it's largely indistinguishable from Barack Obama's.... There's no doubt that the Clinton campaign generally, and Penn in particular, have made a number of big mistakes over the course of the campaign (most notably, their failure to seriously contest the caucus states). But these mistakes were all tactical rather than ideological: Hillary's campaign isn't floundering because its agenda was too moderate or tepid.
I think this is misses both the point of Mark's piece and the points made by Penn's critics. Leaving aside the fact that we don't really know if Penn supported the campaign's policy positioning, the campaign didn't push a coherent progressive narrative. When Clinton campaigned on the issues she either got into the weeds of policy, or she used particular policies to attack her opponents -- but she didn't do either in a consistent way. Sometimes she attacked Obama from the right on policy, for example when she embraced conservative rhetoric to attack Obama for, among other things, having once supported strong gun control and single-payer healthcare. At other times she attacked him from the left, for having a non-universal health care plan. And fundamentally, the defining issue of the race was Iraq, and her early positioning there, not to mention her vote on Kyl-Lieberman, were hugely influential in driving progressives away from her campaign.
Moreover, her main argument -- that only she had the experience and savvy to effectively pursue change -- didn't have any ideological content at all. And then, when she embraced populist rhetoric after Feb 5th, she did well in Ohio and Texas -- showing how counterproductive Penn's messaging had been up to then. As Mark Schmitt likes to say, it's not what you say about the policies, it's what the policies say about you. Penn's biggest failing was his refusal to allow the policies to talk about Clinton.
--Sam Boyd
