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Over at Politico, Ben Smith thinks Mark Penn really has been ejected from the Clinton campaign, and composes a eulogy of sorts for the adviser. It's about as odd a eulogy as I've ever read:
Penn, one of the most influential political advisors of his generation, nevertheless accomplished a great deal as the campaign's top strategist. Clinton began the campaign with obvious vulnerabilities: A high percentage of Americans disliking her; the ambiguous experience of a White House spouse; and little natural charisma.With his trademark barrage of poll numbers, Penn – who had worked with Bill Clinton since the former president's 1996 re-election campaign — managed to persuade journalists and Democratic voters that the New York senator could actually win a general election.I'm young, but I'm not that young. The bulk of the party never really considered Clinton unelectable. That's why she was the frontrunner for the nomination since the day John Kerry conceded the election to George W. Bush. Conversely, she really did have weaknesses in her high unfavorables, a megawatt spouse, and an unclear role in the 90s (I've never bought that she lacked charisma). So did Mark Penn mitigate these weaknesses?Not really. According to most of these polls, Hillary Clinton's unfavorables currently outpace her favorables. It's an open question whether anyone could have reined Bill Clinton in, but his denigration of Obama right before the South Carolina primary unquestionably did Hillary's campaign more harm than good. And as we saw with the Bosnia comment, and recent articles questioning Clinton's role in S-CHIP, her role in the White House is still an ambiguous, even fraught, subject. If these were, indeed, the metrics, then Penn failed. In fact, the only real accomplishment I spy for Penn is in convincing reporters to ignore those failures and instead herald the peculiar achievement of convincing Democrats that the candidate they originally favored, and who regularly led in national horserace polling, had a chance. That's a neat trick, though not one that proved terribly useful to Hillary Clinton.
