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Wednesday 8 October 2008

Penn is a thing of the past

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Mark Penn is not a popular chap and for the next few days Washington will engage in its favourite sport: kicking a man when he’s down. What will get lost in all this is that Penn was good at what he did: slicing and dicing the electorate into ever finer pieces. But what the troubles of the Clinton campaign have shown, among other things, is that this is not longer enough.

What remains to be seen is whether Penn’s strategy failed because his candidate was up against an exceptional politician in Obama or because the electorate is tired of this kind of micro-targeting. My hunch is that micro-targeting, the campaign technique of the last dozen or so years, is no longer as effective as it once was. Voters are yearning for a more ambitious, more noble politics. 

PS Do read this interview that Matt did with Mark Penn when Penn’s book Micro-Trends came out.

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