Hillary Should Not Give Mark Penn One More Cent

Hillary Clinton has been trying to pay down her campaign debt over the past 5 months and she has reached an important milestone- she only owes money to one firm- unfortunately, it’s Mark Penn’s firm and she still owes over two million:

The nation’s top diplomat has been steadily chipping away at unpaid campaign bills since suspending her White House bid in June 2008, when her debt peaked at $25.2 million. That amount covered $12 million owed to vendors, as well as the $13.2 million she loaned her campaign from personal funds.

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Her campaign owed $6.4 million to 16 creditors at the end of November; $5.9 million to five creditors at the end of December; and the current $2.3 million owed to just one creditor at the end of March. That creditor is Penn, Schoen & Berland, a political consulting and polling firm that advised Clinton during her presidential bid. The firm’s president, Mark Penn, was Clinton’s senior campaign strategist until he stepped down last April amid revelations that he had lobbied on behalf of Colombia for a U.S.-Colombia trade deal that Clinton opposed. Penn remained involved with the campaign.

I wouldn’t give Penn one more cent because I believe he played a major role in her defeat in the 2008 presidential election. I understand that it is rather en vogue to scapegoat one or two people after a candidate loses and I also understand that Mark Penn alone was not responsible for Hillary’s defeat, although it became crystal clear during the campaign that he remained consistently tone-deaf during the primaries and beyond and his inability to understand the consequences of not focusing enough on some of the early caucus states and the role that would play in the delegate fiasco, definitely makes him a candidate for the architect of her defeat.

There was an interesting article in the UK Independent after the 2008 election- it was an interview with Mark Penn and it clearly showed he takes little to no responsibility for giving Hillary bad advice during the campaign:

Mr Penn, you blew it, didn’t you? Were you so interested in microtrends that you completely missed the huge desire for change? “Well, no,” he says, taken aback. “I think that, you know, I think … the book is really a non-political book.”

Yes, but we’re not talking about the book. We’re talking about the view in Washington that he threw it all away. The accusations of arrogance and complacency. He was the one who told Hillary to play tough, model herself on Margaret Thatcher and refuse to apologise for supporting the war in Iraq. When others urged her to show a little more humanity, Penn reportedly said: “Being human is over-rated.”

This is a man whose friend once described him as having “the IQ of Bill Gates and the emotional intelligence of an eggplant”. Now Penn says, in his surprisingly high-pitched voice: “Hillary ran on a theme of ready for change, ready to lead. Change was always a central and important part of her message.” That’s strange. I could have sworn it was more like, “Don’t trust the new guy, vote for someone with experience”. But anyway. “Look, at the end of the day, they both got about 18 million votes. It was the hardest-fought primary in the history of America. And it turned out that some small groups switched and became critical players.” Which is a pitch for his theory, obviously. “At the end of the day, they are separated by only 85 delegates out of close to 4,000.”

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Really? So why did Penn say in a memo of March 2007 that Obama was unelectable? “Huh. No. It doesn’t say that at all.” Yes it does, if the facsimile published by Atlantic Monthly magazine is correct. The great communicator appears thrown. “Those memos, right, that came out, were really … er, were really, I think, show you, you know, just a piece, because … a small part, a piece of how we were looking to, I think, set up or solve the fact that he was a very strong candidate.”

As far as I’m concerned, Mark Penn over-charged the campaign with respect to his firm’s services and here is an example of one of his billing records.

Time Magazine online has more, here.

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