What Was Hillary Thinking?
Picking Mark Penn to run her campaign speaks volumes.
Mark Penn has his uses. Running Hillary Clinton's campaign wasn't one of them. He was the wrong person at the wrong time for the wrong job. But, in fairness, he didn't choose himself. Hillary picked him—and stuck with him. That she did so speaks volumes about why she may well lose the race to Barack Obama.
At a time when voters clearly wanted change—big change—in Washington and in politics, Hillary chose as her "chief strategist" a multimillionaire corporate consultant who was the epitome of the D.C. lobbying and PR game of the Clinton and Bush II years.
Penn is who he is and makes no apologies for it. But what was Hillary thinking? Clearly, as the campaign began, she thought that she was on her way to a triumphal Restoration, and that having a capital courtier as guide was a proper prelude to coronation.
Only one problem: we don't generally do Restorations in America. This is not England, and the Clintons are not the Stuarts, or the Adamses or even the Bushes. Americans tend to look forward.
And voters tend not to like a candidate who insults their intelligence. Did Hillary think they wouldn't notice that her anti-corporate campaign was being run by a corporate guy?
Penn is an utterly brilliant fellow, but one who sometimes seems to understand America primarily through numbers. Though he wanted to be a political journalist when he was at Harvard, he was drawn to polling-based political consulting instead. Perhaps he found it easier to deal with people in the aggregate. In private he is a warm and considerate family man. But in business he can be brutally dismissive of anyone he thinks lacks his brains or data—which means almost everybody. He sometimes behaved as if he didn't even have to bother trying to explain things to the cretins around him.
Like many students of politics, Penn was oblivious to his own political profile. And again, it must be said, Clinton was equally blind—or arrogant—about what Penn's preeminence would signal. How else do you explain the decision to let him remain as Washington boss of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest PR and lobbying firms, while, in effect, running the campaign? What planet were they on?
Answer: Planet Washington. Only among insiders in Washington would this kind of arrangement be considered even vaguely acceptable. The firm's list of clients—including the notorious Blackwater security company and the government of Colombia—was almost comically "off-message" for a Democratic campaign.
The acid tone permeated the campaign—but, again, that was Clinton's fault. She is the one who set up an unstable and untenable organization chart. It had a literally part-time Penn at its apex and everybody around him in what eventually became a circular firing squad.
John McCain's campaign is larded up with corporate consultants, but at least one of the top ones, Charlie Black, had the good sense to quit his own job at Burson.
Obama and his team are hardly saints. They have their Washington and corporate ties; they have their well-do-do and well-connected media and polling consultants. But it didn't take an industrial-strength "oppo" team to see Penn as a political clay pigeon.
Perhaps it was the money that led to the blindness all around. Hillary's launching pad was the Clinton money crowd of the '90s, and Penn knew—and was generally respected by—all of them. As for Penn, he didn't want to give up his stake in business for the mere task of electing another president. He had already helped to do that with Bill Clinton.
Penn will stay on, in a reduced role as a polltaker—the job he probably should have had to begin with—although why he is remaining at all given his ties to Burson is a mystery.
In retrospect, what Hillary should have done was move her entire campaign out of Washington, maybe to her home town of Chicago. On second thought, somebody else had already claimed that place.
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Howard Fineman is Newsweek's Senior Washington Correspondent and Columnist, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief. He is the author of "Living Politics," a column that began on MSNBC.COM and Newsweek.com and that now also appears in the print magazine. An award-winning reporter and writer, Fineman also is an analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, appearing regularly on "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and "TODAY." The author of scores of Newsweek cover stories, Fineman's work has appeared as well in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Republic. His 2008 national best-selling book, "The Thirteen American Arguments," was released in paperback by Random House in the spring of 2009.
One of the nation's leading political reporters, Fineman has interviewed every major presidential candidate from (then-vice president) George H.W. Bush in 1985 to (then senator) Barack Obama early and often in the 2008 campaign cycle. His current work focuses on the Obama Administration and its top officials, as well as on Congress and politics throughout the country. Although based in Washington, Fineman travels widely in the U.S. and has covered politics and other events in 49 of the 50 states.
Fineman's work has produced many milestones and awards. A cover story in November 2001 featured President George W. Bush's first extensive interview after 9/11. Another cover, "Bush and God," was part of a series of articles that won the 2003 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. His reporting has helped Newsweek win many honors from the Magazine Publishers Association and the American Journalism Review. Other awards include a "Page One" from the Headliners Club of New York, a "Silver Gavel" from the American Bar Association and a "Deadline Club" from the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ). In 2006 he received the Alumni Award from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
As a reporter and writer, Fineman ranges widely. Besides campaign-year covers, other projects have included: race and politics, the impact of digital technology on society, the influence of Hollywood on politics, the rise of the religious right and of conservative talk radio. He has interviewed business leaders such as George Soros, Bill Gates, Steve Case and Robert Rubin and entertainment figures such as Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda and Jay Leno.
Although now under exclusive television contract to NBC, Fineman over the years has appeared on major public affairs shows, such as Nightline, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday, Larry King Live, Charlie Rose and the NewsHour. He was a regular panelist on Washington Week in Review on PBS (1983-95) and on CNN's Capital Gang Sunday (1995-98). He worked with Ted Koppel on Nightline specials, and has been a guest on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report."
A native of Pittsburgh, Fineman began his career at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, covering the environment, the coal industry and state politics before joining the newspaper's Washington bureau in 1978. He moved to Newsweek in 1980, was named chief political correspondent in 1984, deputy Washington bureau chief in 1993, senior editor in 1995 and senior Washington correspondent and columnist in 2008.
Fineman holds an A.B., Phi Beta Kappa, from Colgate, an M.S. in journalism from Columbia and a J.D. from the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. His legal education included a year as a visiting student at the Georgetown University Law Center. He received Watson and Pultizer Traveling Fellowships for study in Europe, Russia and the Middle East, and has traveled to more than 40 countries, among them China, Vietnam, Japan, Ukraine, Israel, Turkey and the West Bank Palestinian Territories.
Fineman is married to Amy L. Nathan, a senior counsel at the Federal Communications Commission. They live in Washington with their two children, Meredith and Nicholas.
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