Home > The Magazine > Features

Saturday 30 August 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Tips for Gordon

Hillary’s guru has some tips for Gordon

Matthew d'Ancona

Wednesday, 19th September 2007

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

If Hillary Clinton is sworn in as 44th President of the United States in January 2009, the man sitting opposite me in the bar of the Dorchester will become one of the most powerful people in the world. Mark Penn, pollster extraordinaire, adviser to Tony Blair in the 2005 election, and legendary number-cruncher to Bill Clinton is now chief strategist to the Democrat frontrunner and, it is widely believed, Hillary’s alter ego, the man she calls at 7 a.m. wherever she is in the world. In her memoirs, she calls him ‘brilliant and intense’ and ‘shrewd and insightful’.

But it is to discuss Penn’s own book, Microtrends: the Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes (Allen Lane, £20), that we are talking over a forest of Diet Cokes today. The book advances the central thesis that the age of thunderous ‘macro-trends’ plotted by writers such as Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) and John Naisbitt (Megatrends) is emphatically at an end.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 Next page

More articles from: Matthew d'Ancona | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Here’s how McCain can beat Obama to the White House

Reihan Salam

The acclaimed young Republican writer, Reihan Salam, says that McCain can win the presidency if he appeals relentlessly to the non-college-educated white middle class, pursues family-friendly tax reform and stands for global peace through American strength

Beijing Notebook

Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson recalls his recent jaunt to China on the occasion of the Olympic games

Our obsession with paedophilia is more dangerous than Gary Glitter’s return

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that the hunt for this foul child molester is the symptom of an unhealthy and disproportionate fixation that has spawned all sorts of absurd rules and regulations

Confessions of a travelling non-dom

O`ar Pali

O’ar Pali says it isn’t easy being on planes next to strangers all the time — and you quickly find there are a series of character types, dying to tell you about themselves

Reading on the web is not really reading

Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby laments the intellectual crisis now gripping America and says that the torrent of digital infotainment is threatening basic literacy and news knowledge

Speaking for the silent majority

George Osborne

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

Shared Opinion

Hugo Rifkind

The view from 2018: how it all went wrong for Prime Minister Osborne

No child left behind

Ed Balls

The Conservatives think that education is about selecting the lucky few, says Ed Balls. But there is no reason why excellence and opportunity shouldn’t be for all

Welcome to the United States of Amnesia

Mary Wakefield

Gore Vidal tells Mary Wakefield that America has forgotten its constitutional roots, and explains why Bobby Kennedy was ‘the biggest son of a bitch in politics’

Obama failed this week as well as Clinton

James Forsyth

James Forsyth says that Hillary’s disappointment in Tuesday’s primaries is matched by the decline in Obama’s image, as the sheen of the wunderkind fades and doubts multiply