Will Mark Penn Watch the Inauguration?

Tuesday, 20th January 2009

Remember Mark Penn? Hillary Clinton's chief strategist provided much entertainment during the primary campaign. It's especially worth reminding you of the most famous memo he sent Hillary in which he promised that Barack Obama was, well, toast:

His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values...
Let's explicitly own "American" in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn't...

We are never going to say anything about his background - we have to show the value of ours when it comes to making decisions, understanding the needs of most American - the invisible Americans...

Well that didn't work out too well, did it? The point is not really to chuckle at Penn's expense but to remember that, in fact, Penn's analysis was widely shared. In fact it was close to being the conventional wisdom (an, thus, likely to be wrong...) In other words, huge swathes of the political class - the people paid the big bucks to understand the voters and their fears and hopes and interests - were proven to be rather, make that completely, out of touch this year. As I say, it may well be that the perceived extremity of the times made voters more open to seemingly radical, unprecedented possibilities and solutions, but if so this was something that much of the political-media class missed. Not for the first time, the "professionals" under-estimated the "amateurs".

Also: does Mark Penn still believe what he wrote in this memo? Or was he simply telling the Clinton campaign the sort of stuff they might like to hear? Actually, that's unfair: I imagine Penn did believe this, or at least convinced himself to believe it, takin the view that, yo, it's all in the game...