Mark Penn Firing Watch: Infinity!!1!EleventyOne!1!!
Photo: AP/Jerry Lai/Burson-Marsteller.com
Okay, enough with the numbered days already. One, it’s kind of pointless after missing ten days due to illness (not that I couldn’t have filled those ten days with individual posts on Penn’s egregious conflicts of interest; believe me, I could); and two, it’s pretty damn clear that no matter how clear and contemptible his fuckupery, she’s not going to dump him.
For today, I’m just going to indulge in a bit of lovely schadenfreude, courtesy of the New York Observer. NYO has three - count ‘em; three - articles this week on the blithering idiot that is Penn.
Fittingly, Jason Horowitz (or his editor) slaps Penn around from jump with the headline "Micro Mark," in a piece that begins with Penn whining that people "misunderstand" his brilliant strategy:
“There was a misunderstanding that this campaign was about small things. It never was. If anything, the Obama campaign has microtargeted constituencies.”
This, from Mr. "Microtrends" himself.
“I think that virtually every schoolchild knows that she is ‘ready on day one,’ said Mr. Penn, referring to one of the slogans he designed for Mrs. Clinton. “If you look back—at the beginning she was ‘ready for change and ready to lead’ and that’s something that built a large coalition that carried her through Super Tuesday. Between then and now, there was a period where the campaign didn’t have resources to play ahead in those states it needed to campaign in.”
As he put it, his strategy had succeeded in the “biggest message-oriented states.”
‘Cause, you know, those caucus states don’t count, and shit. Seriously: "biggest message-oriented states"? WTF is a message-oriented state? It sounds like a Karl Rove’s number-one mental tic.
Oh, and that "not having the resources it needed" bit? Whose fault was that? Sweet jumping jeebus, but this moron has no sense of irony. Which, of course, is perfect, considering that he’s a DLC Boy, and therefore, the bastard brother of Rove’s GOP.
But the money line is this:
He reserves a special disdain for a group he identifies as the “impressionable elites”: people who can afford to pick candidates based on fuzzy feelings rather than on the impact the candidates’ policies will have on their lives. At a recent discussion of the book at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, during which Mr. Penn said, “The theory of the book is that the era of big trends is over,” one audience member asked if Mr. Obama was not a “macrotrend.”
Yeah, "impressionable elites" - Penn’s sole audience. He exists purely by and for the chattering classes, of which he is a card-carrying member. And I’d really like to know who he is to be calling other people "elites" (see DLC Boy, above). Hell, he couldn’t even be bothered to stick around to play Chief Strategist the night before the Potomac Primary; it was more important to him to grab the shuttle to New York to plug his latest useless contribution to the deforestation of the planet.
I guess that $3.8 mil. in January alone wasn’t enough to keep him on-task. Nor, apparently was the $10+ million total that he’s raked in from Clinton so far, even with his continuing income from Burson-Marsteller Worldwide (and, thus, from John McCain’s chief strategist).
But to enjoy the schadenfreude more fully, don’t miss NYO’s other two articles. Ostensibly pieces about Leon Panetta and Harold Ickes, they’re actually [well-deserved] hatchet jobs on Penn. No, I have no illusions about Panetta and Ickes, either, but it’s a beautiful thing to see them go for Penn’s jugular for the sheer sport of it. (Okay, so maybe not "sport" - how about a little well-timed revenge?)
Ultimately, though, Clinton’s refusal to can Penn in the face of such an abysmally stupid performance makes me glad that Obama appears to be the likely nominee. Because if she insists on remaining joined at the hip to this sort of fuckwittery on her campaign, who do you think would be attached to her in the White House?
