Mark Penn and the Clintons

I try not to post about my former employers or talk about partisan politics in Damage Control 101-- and I will probably get myself in trouble for this one. But I have to put my two cents in with the news this evening that Mark Penn is abandoning his leadership role on the Clinton campaign (please note that his polling firm is not giving up its lucrative role).

I have never thought that Mark Penn had very good political instincts, and I think that has been proven one more time during this campaign. The hubris that he could effectively be lead campaign strategist while running a PR agency the size and scope of Burson-Marstellar is mind boggling.

I do not know him well, but we did work together during my years in the Clinton White House, and my experience with him is, I think, instructive. It was my view that he totally misread the realities of the Republican members of the House of Representatives, and as a result the political strategy employed during the Monica Lewinsky debacle was totally ineffective, resulting in the House impeachment vote.

Mark would argue almost on a daily basis that despite the movement towards impeachment in the House, his polling was showing that President Clinton's approval ratings were high and getting higher as the Republicans pressed their campaign. Thus, keep playing off the national approval ratings, and the House Republicans would never have the nerve to go ahead with impeachment.

That is good and fine on a national level, but Republican House members aren't elected or beholden to the general public on a national level. They only have to worry about their Republican-leaning districts, where support for impeachment and against the President was closer to what Gingrich, Delay, and their soldiers were pushing.

I knew from first-hand experience. As one of the main staff managers for the Democrats after the Republicans took back the House following the 1994 mid-term elections, we forced those Republican members to take awful votes on their Contract for American legislation. These included forcing them to vote on amendments that would exempt from their priorities any provisions if they threatened the health and safety of, for example, pregnant women and their unborn children. The amendments we drafted and forced them to vote on week after week were designed to push the limits of their loyalty to the Republican leadership, who would tolerate no dissension in the ranks. We wanted to set up votes that would hopefully split at least the more vulnerable members from their conference.

We were unsuccessful, no mater how ugly and indefensible the provisions we crafted. They would march down to the well in lockstep and vote against these exemptions, under threat of punishment by the House Republican leadership. Having witnessed this up close and personal, I know that Penn's strategy was destined to fail.

Instead, some of us argued, we had to go into the vulnerable districts and find allies of those Republicans who would make the case against voting to impeach. This was never done in any meaningful way, in part because the powers-that-be were listening to Penn and his polls.

This is the same sort of tone-deaf strategy that Penn has brought to the Clinton campaign. What I cannot explain, and what is more troubling to me about the campaign, is the blind loyalty that the Clintons have for Penn and other long-time loyalists that they have brought into the campaign. Isn't this the exact kind of circle-the-wagons approach that has gotten them into trouble from the beginning of their run in national politics?