There’s been a lot of talk about whether Mark Penn will be thrown under the bus to help right Hillary’s campaign or whether, win or lose, her troubles will spell the end of stranglehold of ridiculousness over large sections of the Democratic party. But we shouldn’t expect anything to happen too soon. The Clinton (and I mean both of them) relationship is extremely tight. It transcends the normal pol-consultant arrangement.
Here’s a note from an informed observer I received today …
They go back to 94, when (as I understand it) Hillary helped bring Dick Morris back into the WH and he in turn brought in Penn, ousting Stan Greenberg. Ever since then they’ve been inseparable. It’s a far more personal relationship than the usual consultant/politician relationship. They’re completely intertwined.
Penn is the worst kind of agenda pollster. He’s a complete charlatan. Never shows his work. Methodologically he’s a disaster. He crafts his questions so to get the results that support whatever advice he’s giving the candidate and it’s only in campaigns like this when his advice bumps up against reality that people start to ask questions about what’s going on.
It’s pretty obvious that in Iowa his polling was totally off the mark and they had no idea what was happening. My suspicion is that rather than him being devious with the ‘Where’s the Bounce’ meme, his polling was just wrong again.
As far as I’m aware, he’s never won a difficult campaign. In 2000 he was fired for putting the Gore campaign in the exact same trouble, but unlike Gore, I can’t imagine there’s any way that the Clintons are going to fire him. They have this sort of irrational love for him because they believe his incremental/triangulation advice is what saved his presidency.
All I’m really saying is that people need to understand how big of a deal it would be if Penn was to be sidelined. That’s huge. That’s a divorce of the biggest political magnitude imaginable.
I can’t say I know much about the Clinton-Penn relationship myself. But I’ve watched his polls over more than a decade now, including various presentations of his findings. (See the new Penn poll? Something I was used to hearing on the lips of my New Dem friends.) And they’ve always struck me as precisely what this reader says — a classic case of cherry-picking data, or rather framing the questions to yield your desired result. Mark might have been a good fit for the Rumsfeld Defense Department in this sense.
There’s always this risk with what you might call ideological pollsters. And by this I mean ones who are not just professional survey takers and public opinion specialists but are also activists in the context of one or the other party’s politics. But Penn seems that way to an almost parodic degree.
In the context of an election that risks sending a campaign adrift into the treacherous waters of its own wishful thinking. And again, what tough, hard-fought races has Penn won? Someone remind me.
Late Update: TPMer Eric Kleefeld makes a good point. Not only is Penn a good match for the Rumsfeld DOD in his cherry-picking of data. He seems even more so in how much he seems not to have given his candidate a Plan B if everything didn’t go precisely as expected. Obama winning Iowa was always a real possibility. And with only five days separating Iowa from New Hampshire that always had to mean he’d hit New Hampshire on the crest of a sizable Iowa bump. But they really do not seem to have had a plan for this very very realistic possibility.
