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A few weeks back, we tried to pre-empt the inevitable quest for this year’s group of easily labeled swing voters by tossing out a few candidates for the Soccer Moms of 2008 award. Among them were “Ageist Grannies”—seniors who judge candidates of their own generation more harshly than they judge others. Turns out we weren’t too far off.
The other day, Clinton pollster Mark Penn coined a new buzz group: “active grannies.” He defines them as “empty-nesters who have found a new freedom in their lives after the kids have left and who look at the world very differently than do their kids graduating college.” Some of these folks are attracted to Obama because of his proposed tax breaks for seniors and his Social Security and health care plans. Some like McCain because “they believe that the country has had a fundamental break in values from the past.”
Here’s an even easier way to think about this cute new group: old people. Penn attributes their strength mostly to demographics. Large numbers of seniors live in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And over the past two decades, they make up an increasingly large portion of the electorate. So it’s not really the formation of a new group. (What qualifies these people as “active” is unclear.) It’s the growth of an old one.
Also, as Penn points out, this group has apparently chosen every president (or at least every winner of the popular vote) for the past 40 years. In other words, they’ve been swing voters for decades. Why the big fuss this year?
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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.
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It might be tempting to cast Mark Penn's departure as the result of a dramatic internal struggle—the triumph of emotional, character-based messaging over Penn's numbers-based "strength and experience" mantra. But that's not what happened. He just screwed up one too many times.
Penn handed in his resignation as chief strategist early Sunday, after a Friday
Wall Street Journal article reported that Penn had met with the Colombian government to discuss a trade deal that Clinton herself opposed. (He was representing his PR firm, Burson-Marsteller Worldwide.) When news of the meeting first broke on Friday, Penn said he had made an "error in judgment." The Clintons were reportedly furious. Even the Colombian government
turned on Penn: His statement showed a "lack of respect" for the people of Colombia, they said before terminating his contract.
The list of Penn screw-ups is long but easily summarized: Many in the Clinton campaign blame him for Hillary's loss in Iowa; her decision not to compete in other caucus states, allowing Obama run up a string of victories in them; and her failure to match Obama's overarching message of inspiration with one of her own. (One of the few times Clinton
didn't stick with Penn's script—the famous Diner Sob—is widely credited for her stunning New Hampshire comeback.) Then there's the time
he told the L.A. Times that none of the problems in the Clinton camp were his fault, the time he repeated the word
cocaine on
Hardball while discussing Obama's youthful drug use, and the time he
told reporters that Obama "can't win" in a general election.
Given all this, it's a very good thing that Penn is out. Since joining the campaign, he and his firm billed more than $13 million. He sowed strife within the campaign's ranks. And whatever his brilliance, to critics watching CNN and MSNBC, he represented the breathless machinations of the Clinton camp. It was fitting that her man behind the curtain was this sweaty, haggard—most outlets use the word
rumpled—reedy-voiced man who seemed to believe everything and nothing all at once. If anything, Obama should be trying to get Penn to stay.
But Penn's biggest screw-up of all was not screwing up earlier. If the goal was to alienate working-class Pennsylvania voters who ferociously oppose free-trade deals and outsourcing, then his Colombia meeting could not have been better timed. Obama is narrowing the gap in the Keystone State.
Trade unions have already released statements slamming Penn—and Clinton, by association—for hypocrisy. The Obama camp may choose to slam her for it, too. But for now, they're sitting back and watching the show.
In a statement, Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams said that "Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign." As long as it doesn't involve talking, they should be fine.
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There could have been worse moments for revelations to emerge that Mark Penn met with one client, the Colombian embassy, to discuss a free-trade agreement opposed by another client, Hillary Clinton. It could have happened on a slow news day, as opposed to the 40th anniversary of MLK’s assassination. Or a day when Clinton wasn’t releasing seven years of tax returns.
But because it didn't get much attention today, it remains to be seen how much impact this unwisest of unwise decisions—for Penn has made others—will have on the campaign. Obama spokesman Bill Burton reminded reporters of Clinton’s response to Austan Goolsbee’s meeting with Canadian officials: “I would ask you to look at this story and substitute my name for Sen. Obama’s name and see what you would do with this story. … Just ask yourself [what you would do] if some of my advisers had been having private meetings with foreign governments.”
Keep in mind that the situations are barely analogous. Goolsbee met with Canadian officials on behalf of the Obama campaign and allegedly said things that made Obama sound hypocritical. Penn, on the other hand, was representing his PR firm, Burston-Marsteller (although, oddly, a spokesman for Colombia’s president wasn’t sure). And while the meeting certainly makes Mark Penn sound hypocritical, it’s hard to extend the blame to Clinton herself.
Still, Penn is no doubt on the receiving end of a very large paddle right now. It’s not good enough for Penn to say, "I may be a hypocrite, but my client is not." For someone who sells a candidacy based largely on judgment, Penn displayed very little of it. As Josh Marshall put it, “[W]hen [Clinton’s] political future is on the line in a state like Pennsylvania, wracked by the loss of industrial jobs for decades, you think he could have waited a few more weeks before prancing off to help get a new free trade pact passed?” This campaign has seen unprecedented conflation of surrogate and candidate (Power, Ferraro, Shaheen)—it’s optimistic to think this crap won’t trickle up.
Penn has since apologized, but damned if Obama’s allies aren’t going to milk this like a Lancaster udder.
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