Tips for Gordon

Hillary’s guru has some tips for Gordon

Matthew d'Ancona

22 September 2007

An interview with Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist

‘The world may be getting flatter, in terms of globalisation,’ he writes, ‘but it is occupied by six billion little bumps who do not have to follow the herd to be heard. No matter how offbeat their choices, they can now find 100,000 people or more who share their taste for deep fried yak on a stick.’ We are observing ‘the niching of America’, says the 53-year-old pollster, an ever-changing mosaic of ‘small, under-the-radar forces that can involve as little as 1 per cent of the population, but which are powerfully shaping our society’. Choice has prevailed over uniformity. It is ‘the triumph of the Starbucks economy over the Ford economy’.

The book is an excellent read, not least because Penn provides 75 examples of his theory (‘a periodic table of trends’), meaning that Microtrends is also great fun to go back to, and dip into. My favourites were the ‘Young Knitters’, the American teens who knit and talk about it on MySpace, to get into ‘the zone’ (‘it’s therapy, with a hat to take home afterwards’); and ‘Pro-Semites’, goyim who love Jews and Jewish practices so much they actively seek out Jewish spouses or mimic the bar mitvah ritual for their young.

So, I ask, whatever happened to the future of science fiction movies and the Epcot Center where we all expected to walk around in identical pyjamas and eat soya? Penn, dressed in a blue Lauren polo shirt and always keeping one eye on his BlackBerry, chuckles.

‘That vision of society in the future was really that we were going to be so big that we’d have no choice but to eliminate personal choice. And so we would all dress, act, look the same, and the State would get bigger and more controlling. At least in many societies the opposite has happened. Some combination of an expansion of tolerance — which I think was a critical underpinning to this — the internet itself, the way the means of production and manufacturing changed, I think has instead led to an explosion of personal choice.’

A vivid example, and another of Penn’s groups, are the ‘Internet Marrieds’: once furtive about having met through web introduction services, such couples may soon be seen as proud pioneers, having turned technology into a pathway to personal bliss. ‘Make that Cupid’s Arrow a surgical strike,’ as he puts it.

The intellectual arrow in the book is that some of these trends are not just a source of interest and amusement, but have the potential to change everything. What he calls ‘intense identity groups’ have the capacity to send shockwaves through the social and political system — especially if they reach the critical mass of 1 per cent of a particular target population.