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  Mark Penn's Winning Strategy

  In the new issue of Time, Karen Tumulty's list of the Five Mistakes Hillary Made includes a damning anecdote from a Clinton campaign strategy session last year:

  As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?"
  

  So maybe that's why Clinton says she'd be winning if the Democrats used Republican rules. Her chief strategist thought they did!
  

  Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson tells me he's "denying on behalf of Penn" that it ever happened.
  

  Published Thursday, May 08, 2008 7:39 PM by Christopher Beam
  Email jcbeam@gmail.com

  Filed under: Hillary Clinton, Mark Penn

About Christopher Beam

• Christopher Beam is a Slate political reporter.