The Real Case Against Mark Penn
I predicted a few weeks ago that we would start to see more stories about the
bizarrely conflicting roles of one Mark Penn, who holds down the job of
"Worldwide President and CEO" of the fifth-largest public relations firm in the
universe (Burson-Marsteller) while also apparently being the
de facto campaign manager for Senator
Clinton's presidential bid.
Ari
Berman of the Nation has now opened the bidding with a superb article
revealing much of what it actually means to be Worldwide President and CEO of
Burson-Marsteller, including presiding over more than one Republican lobbying
operation and a
union-busting
outfit that was once prominently featured on the Burson-Marsteller website
but was quickly given the
"Commissar
Vanishes" treatment after I mentioned it
in
passing. I wasn't actually that interested in Penn's conflicts of interest
as in the nature of his advice and his polling, and its influence on American
politics. (I'm told that Berman will have more about Penn-as-pollster in the
print edition of the Nation.)
Kevin
Drum asks a good youngest-child-question: "Can someone explain to me the
cult of the pollster in big-league politics?....Surely any politician with an IQ
in three digits is pretty well aware of what people think and how they vote."
Indeed, at some point, probably dating to Patrick Caddell's role in the Carter
campaign, the superstar pollster joined the media buyer in the small subset of
campaign workers who live in Georgetown townhouses and Virginia horse farms.
But I'm not as skeptical as Kevin of the role of pollsters, which is why my
argument is specific to Penn, and why I'll use this opportunity to say a little
more about it.
It's hard to imagine a political campaign without a good pollster
in the room. It's easy to get basic data on what people think, but, for example,
if I were a candidate pushing health care, I would want to know everything there
is to know about public attitudes on health care and policy, and who trusted
messengers are and what language works, and what constituencies I'm reaching,
and all that. Good pollsters provide that context, and if they're very good,
they also help you understand which views are deeply held and which can be
vulnerable to persuasion.
There is another kind of polling that can be useful to campaigns and which
appears to be Penn's specialty, which tries to understand the population by
breaking it down into different groups based on demographics and values. This
can be hugely revealing and extremely valuable. The Pew Research Center's
periodic studies of
"Political
Typology" are a premiere example of this work, creating categories such as
"Upbeats" and "Pro-Government Conservatives" that generally share attitudes on
policy and have much in common demographically. Such an analysis is highly
complex, as you essentially put all the data together and try to find natural
"clusters" of demographics and values that emerge, trying not to impose
categories on the data. You can't do it without a fairly large sample size
(2,000 in the Pew poll) and a long questionnaire. Pollster Stan Greenberg did a
similar analysis, explained most fully in his book,
The Two Americas, in which he created
such memorable categories as "F-You Boys" -- poorly educated white men under 50,
a key part of the Bush base. If these categories are real and robust, it can
help a political strategist figure out how to construct a majority -- for
example, if you know you're going to capture very few of the "F-You Boys," then
what do you need from other categories?
When Penn markets categories such as "soccer moms" and "office park dads," he
seems to be doing the same kind of
analysis. But it's hard to know, because unlike almost any other Democratic
pollster, he never shows his work.
Indeed, my first criticism of Penn was
here
in TPM Cafe last July, responding to an op-ed he co-wrote with James
Carville making broad assertions such as that "Democratic and even independent
women are thrilled with the idea" of Senator Clinton running for president, all
without a single piece of data to support them. It is telling to compare the web
sites of
Penn,
Schoen and Berland and that of Greenberg's firm,
Greenberg,
Quinlan & Rosner: Both firms do plenty of work that is
proprietary, and both have corporate clients. But Greenberg's site is full
of actual data -- the link above goes to a page with 192 reports on U.S.
politics, eleven since the beginning of this year alone! Penn's site has
nothing; a link to
"read
samples of our thinking" goes to a page with links to those same data-free
op-eds! In short, we have no way of knowing whether Penn's demographic
analysis of the electorate is as rigorous as Pew's or Greenberg's or whether he,
if you'll forgive me some technical jargon, pulls it out of his ass. (see update below)
Penn also makes a particular use of his political typology, which is to declare
that a certain voter category of his own devising is "the key" to the election
because it could go either way: soccer moms, office park dads, wired workers,
etc., or in his corporate work, "Mom-fluentials." Even if the category is
firmly defined, and even if it is a "swing" category, that form of analysis
rests on two other assumptions: That almost all other demographic categories are
not swingable, and that the electorate cannot be expanded -- that is, that
non-voters cannot be made voters. But neither assumption is justified: As
I
argued last fall, Karl Rove showed that the Republican base could be
expanded, and so can the Democratic base, and in 2006, virtually every
demographic category increased its Democratic vote significantly. To define a
particular group as key is to deny those other possibilities, and in doing so,
leads to a particular narrowing brand of politics focused exclusively on the
concerns of the group defined as "key," which in Penn's case is reliably the
upper half of the middle class.
In fact, when elections are as tight as they have been recently, any group can
be defined as "key." It doesn't have to be a 50/50 swing vote group. In fact, in
2002, when Penn
argued
that "office-park dads" (white suburban men 25-64) are "the key swing voter
that the party needs in order to win the next election," he was actually
highlighting a reliably Republican group, acknowledging that, "Democrats don't
need to win office park dads outright...We just need to fight for our share."
Sure, but using that kind of logic, any
group can be declared the "key swing voter": white evangelicals, atheists,
F-You Boys, unmarried women, union members or non-union members, etc. A group
voting 10% Democratic could go to 20%; a group voting 80% Democratic could go to
90. The choice is entirely arbitrary.
And that fact proves Ari Berman's conclusion that Penn's choice of categories
has little to do with the actual data and everything to do with his presumptions
going in -- populism doesn't work, don't criticize corporations -- which in turn
have a delightfully precise correspondence with the interests of the clients of
the firm of which Penn is Worldwide President and CEO. And that's why
neither Senator Clinton, the people with good sense in her campaign, labor
leaders or other Democrats should accept lobbyist Howard Paster's explanation to
Berman that Penn's corporate and anti-union clientele is "part of a whole
'nother life we lead."
Fortunately,
Ezra
Klein is calling those people and asking why they accept that claim.
UPDATE: "pulls it out of his ass" is obviously a loaded phrase, and I
thought about changing it -- perhaps to "butt" -- but decided instead to give a
more detailed example of analysis that might fit that description: The only
example of a Penn poll I can find was his 2002 "office-park dads" poll, which is
reported
here.
The report makes elaborate statements about the policy preferences of
office-park dads. But the poll it actually links to is a general poll of 800
likely voters, with a margin of error of 3.96%. Penn says that office-park dads
are 15% of the electorate (more on that in a minute), so the subsample of
office-park dads in the poll would be about 120 people. A national poll of 120
people would have a margin of error of nine percent, and would be absolutely
useless.
And 15% seems rather high for the office-park dads category, which Penn defines
as suburban men ages 25-64. That number could only reach 15% by making no
distinction between white-collar and blue-collar, in which case the whole "office-park" aspect of "office-park dad" is lost! (I realize the "dad" aspect is also lost, since with a 40-year age range, chances are that less than half of these suburban men have children at home or in college.)
This is quite interesting and the final paragraphs seem to me to hit the nail on the head. Penn came to prominence in the 96 election when he helped Clinton achieve the political goal that he (Clinton) had decided after 92 was the key to his re-election : winning the Perot voters.
This also happened to be the most sought after group of consumers.
Fortunately for the Republicans, and even more importantly their consultants, they found a different group they could identify as a crucial political constituency that was also to become highly sought out as consumers among southern, ex-urban and rural super-church-goers. And what the Republicans figured out (and here's what makes pollsters and media buyers rich) now only what these voters wanted but where they consumed information and thus how to reach them in a way that was maximally cost-efficient and had the least collateral impact of allowing that message to reach others who might react differently.
The point about the base is right -- we Dems could do what Rove did and enlarge our base. The difference however is that the folks we should be working to register, educate, mobilize to broaden our base are not the key to any big company's consumer group. There's no commercial pay-off to knowing a lot about lower-income, primarily urban, heavily black and hispanic, younger, and largely female voters. Thats the key to our political success but no one is going to write books about, or sell a lot of products by, about marketing to this constituency. And as a result, there are few media of any sort that will allow a message to be tailored to this massive slice of America.
May 9, 2007 11:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I want to like Senator Clinton, but when ever one peels the layers you find people like Penn, etc. The slime quotient just gets to be too much.
May 9, 2007 11:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed. And that's the reason Democrats need to pay particular attention to the Rovian voter turnout issues that TPM keeps exposing as part of the US Attorney scandal. It is very difficult to get the urban, lower economic vote when roadblocks are erected. Our goal must be to push for very easy voter registration--and even easy voting (like absentee which has serious restrictions in some states of which Missouri is an example). I read recently that the goal of registering these folks at the state services office has been cut in half--in other words, the trend is going the wrong way and this is not good news for Democrats. That funding needs to be restored pronto.
I would also submit that the polls show that younger folks are trending Democratic by a significant margin. These folks are mobile and sometimes still in college. Registration and voting obstacles need to be removed for this group.
Rove knows this and it is the reason for the quite nasty campaign to throw up all sorts of roadblocks for voter registration and actual voting. I would further submit that this did not work everywhere in the 2006 midterms because folks were activated to call and trudge the streets in efforts to contact voters.
As far as I'm concerned, ease of voter registration and ease of actually voting needs to be on the Democratic Party platform--and we can add "paper trail" to that.
May 9, 2007 11:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
In fact, when elections are as tight as they have been recently, any group can be defined as "key."
This is why the GOP gift-wrapped an issue for generation by coming out against evolution in a Presidential debate. You can split a hefty chunk of secular pro-business Republicans right off the nutter base with this issue alone. Denying evolution is flat earth society nonsense and incompatible with modern policy in everything from food safety to bioterrorism protections to gene therapy. You're either with science or you're against it.
May 9, 2007 11:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
I would really, really, really like to seethe Clintonistas like Mark Penn, who are responsible for the Democratic Party having to be re-taken over the past five years by "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" - these bend-over-and-spread corporate blowjobbers - run out of the party. If Hillary Clinton is taking advice from Mr. Blow-It-Out-His-Ass, then the weakest candidate (she performs the weakest against any of the most-likely Republicans compared to Edwards or Obama, who performs best) is going to be even weaker. I only wish she'd realize that constitutional republics do not need actual dynasties, and would instead decide to become a Lioness of the Senate in the tradition of the old Lion of the Senate who could never be President, Ted Kennedy.
May 9, 2007 11:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
'mom-fluentials?' The man should never work again simply for coming up with that perversion of English!
May 9, 2007 11:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hillary + Republicans = Penn
In 2000 Jack Quinn, former White House counsel to President Bill Clinton, and
Ed Gillespie, former Chairman of the Republican National Committee, joined forces and created a lobbying firm named, Quinn Gillespie & Associates.
During the Clinton impeachment investigations Gillespie was Director of Communications and Congressional Affairs for the Republican National Committee at the same time Quinn was in the Clinton White House.
"They're all in it together."
May 9, 2007 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's a broken link to Berman's article in the original post. The text that says "Ari Berman of the Nation has now opened the bidding" points to a broken URL. The correct URL is:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070521/berman
May 9, 2007 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why am I not surprised? Penn has been strenuously characterized here as "just a pollster," but he is far, far more than that.
I think the change Americans will be looking for in 2008 does not contemplate setting up a third Bush presidency, and replacing Karl Rove with Penn.
The poisonous aspect of Republicanism is that they'll do anything for money. How is this schmendrik, and by extension Hilary Rodham ("Lucky at Options") Clinton, any different?
May 9, 2007 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
You beat me to it. I read that, had a gag-reflex, and wondered if there were any Tums in the house. One hopes that the SPSS users in the scholarly journals don't head down this particular primrose path. Ugh! Yuck!
aMike
May 9, 2007 12:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Markos and Jerome wrote about this at length in Crashing the Gate. The DLC pollster crowd serve their corporate clients first, and their political clients second. This explains, in part, why we can't get any traction on health care reform--they're always telling the candidates that people are happy with the current state of health care. They operate in opposition to union interests, and they constantly protect the corporate backsides.
Then they insist that the only way to run campaigns is with top-down message control, focused almost entirely on television buys. That they are still saying this in a time when a significant fraction of influencers, especially in younger demographics, are watching YouTube and John Stewart and not the programs where the ads are run.
This approach creates an illusion of control, when in fact what it does is makes campaigns boring, and makes it look to many voters that it doesn't really matter who wins. That put Bush into office in 2000, as people like me voted Nader and the office park dads voted for Bush.
But the tectonics have shifted dramatically. It is now very clear to two thirds of the US population (one could argue clear to everybody--Bush deadenders as well as sentient voters) that it makes a whole lot of difference who gets elected. RI voters even turned out a Senator who they liked, a family fixture in Providence, purely because of his party affiliation. Democrats voted out Lieberman, despite years of service and control of the state machine, because of his attitude on the Iraq occupation.
I really don't see how these strategies can be compelling to candidates. Clinton's approach seems to be to simulate communication and openness. But Edwards is speaking out pretty loudly and clearly. Richardson has staked out a solid position on the occupation. And it's not gonna be Mark Penn's tiptoeing dance around taking a clear stand.
We'll see. The forces arrayed against this approach to politics have gotten much larger, much stronger and much better informed. But they still have the megaphones.
May 9, 2007 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems to me that the key category for Democrats to consider in the 2008 campaign is the huge percentage of people who view Hillary unfavorably and say they won't vote for her.
It's more important that a Democrat win the election than for the candidate most Democrats seem to favor being nominated.
May 9, 2007 12:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, it's fixed now.
May 9, 2007 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Underlines why the 50 state strategy is all the more important. With an independent strong state level organizing and get out the vote machine you are much more likely to reach low income, urban, single women voters; ie the non affluentials that the pollsters ignore.
May 9, 2007 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you're assuming that these two ideas are mutually exclusive. In the minds of many, they aren't. I know plenty of people, including many in my extended family, who don't question science when it comes to food safety, gene therapy, space exploration, computer electonics, everything except general evolution. Specific instances of evolution they will admit are real, such as germs evolving resistances to certain drugs. But not people from apes. They're faith is not threatened by drug resistant germs, but it is threatened if God didn't create the world in six days six thousand years ago.
May 9, 2007 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just discovered a fascinating site which graphs lots of demographic data vs the presidential election voting.
You will see that who you are determines how you will vote in most cases. This puts the whole "tailoring the message" idea into doubt.
Order from Randomness
I suggest trying various variables against votes for Bush in 2004.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
May 9, 2007 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just hope this question keeps coming up. what I'd really like is for some scientists from Kansas, Arkansas and whoever the third guy was to put out a series of questions for Brownback and Huckabee to answer. Do they believe in the 6,000 year earth? Where do they think oil came from? Do they not believe the Vishnu Schist exposed in the Grand Canyon is 2 billion years old? Are they heliocentrists?
This is one reason you'll never see these guys in an uncontrolled setting. But I bet some town meetings in Iowa could be made a lot funnier if some scientists were to show up. Maybe PJPZ Myers could go on a road trip.
May 9, 2007 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good gravy!
You aren't gonna believe this... I actually clicked through and read the links you provided. Crazy huh. Well anyway carville and penn quote a abc/washington post poll with numbers and all that stuff. carville and penn state their opinion after quoting facts from an abc/washington post poll. You pick out their opinion, their opinion stated after they mention the abc/post poll several times, and you say there’s "Not one single piece of data."
Here is the poll carvell and penn mention several times in the article that you say contians "Not one single piece of data":
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/PollVault/Story?id=2009314&page=1
Whew! Daddy! Woow! Mind blower huh buddy. Right dag nab there is the poll. The poll carvell and penn mention and quote numbers from. Right dag nab there in the artcile that you said contains "Not one single piece of data."
Crazy stuff huh. Whew. Mind blower.
The intertubes are wonderful things aren't they? Anybody, regardless of mental ability seems to be able to use them.
Alright lets get serious: You are a faker pal. You play to the rubes. People like you put bush in the white house. Twice.
May 9, 2007 12:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd bet that the interest group that represents Americans who are sick of being split into interest groups by consumer marketing pollsters is probably the biggest one there is. If any of today's politicians eschewed polls altogether and said they believed the public interest was more important than any single interest group or combination of interest groups, they'd surely win in a landslide.
May 9, 2007 12:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Who advises the other candidates? Since many firms have both Democrats and Republicans as principles how rare is it to discover that an advisor's firm represents people that some don't like?
Daniel A. Greenbaum
May 9, 2007 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
rdf, you're misinterpreting this data. Note that what's being analyzed here are state not individual characteristics. The fact that low age at first marriage and the like correlate well with high Bush voting among states says nothing about how individuals will vote. And keep in mind that in all but the reddest and bluest couple of states, more than 1/3 of people vote for the loser in their state.
I spent too many years in grad school working on models to predict vote choice (Dem vs. Rep) in presidential elections using only demographic characteristics ("who you are"). I threw every demographic trait you could think of in the models, and they never accounted for more than 30% of the variation in voting. For better or worse, who you are (without taking into account opinions) only precisely predicts voting for a relatively few people in extreme groups, notably African Americans and Jews on the Dem side, and relatively well-off Evangelicals on the GOP side. For most people, things like union membership, income, education can let you guess right maybe 60% of the time, but no more. Who you are matters, but doesn't come close to determining how you vote.
May 9, 2007 1:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd argue that this is because they never actually think about all the attendant issues around a 5 billion year old earth and extinction. It's indisputably true that there was a period of time when there were no people on earth, but there were other living things. It's indisputably true that species become extinct and are supplanted by other species that fill their niches. We've seen this in real time in island environments and in the spread of species across the globe by human introduction.
It's indisputably true that people have been around for some number of years less than 100,000, depending on what you mean by people. It's indisputably true that humans and chimps share an enormous amount of DNA, which, again, lines up with the fossil record and other evidence of microbiology. They also indisputably share traits with humans that in past were regarded as uniquely human.
It's indisputably true that oil exists because carbon in plants was buried, and put under such pressure over millions of years that its nature became something that we can use to heat our homes and run our automobiles.
The evidence for the relatedness of all living things is indisputably true. We share DNA with fruit flies that do the same things in their development as they do in people. The paleontological evidence, including carbon dating is completely consistent with the genetic evidence.
It has always been odd to me that this evolution thing is the sticking point. You don't see people picketing the AMNH dinosaur bones. You don't see people coming with alternative explanations for the existence of oil or diamonds that don't entail a long period of time. Some people do very silly things like give guided, young earth tours of the Grand Canyon, but for the most part, the central issue is the denial that human beings are the same as all other creatures, of no higher or lower position.
Or at least, that's how it seems to me. People want to deny their true natures. It's baffling to me.
I suppose you can do the intellectual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and saying, as loudly as possible LA LA LA LA. But the truth won't go away because you're afraid to face it.
The reason this science business works so well is that it seeks truth and has developed a very powerful methodology. People who substitute a "belief" for truth do themselves, and more to the point, their children, real harm.
But even worse is insisting that other people's children be taught falsehoods.
May 9, 2007 1:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
And also underlines why the beltway pollsters hate the 50 state strategy.
May 9, 2007 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are two pieces of data in that op-ed, and neither is from Penn's own research. One is Clinton's overall approval rating, the other involves the percentages of women and Hispanics in the electorate. Neither bit of data supports the main claim of the op-ed, which is that women, and independent women in particular, look more favorably on Clinton than on other candidates. As I wrote, not one piece of data to support the assertion I quoted.
May 9, 2007 1:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well if what you say is true then why hire pollsters? It would seem their advice won't be of much value.
What seems to influence swing voters (the only ones anyone cares about) seems to be the zeitgeist. Right now themes of corruption and war are pervading people's consciousness and I doubt a message going against the trend will have much effect.
I also don't understand your point. If I know that a certain state has a high number of people with characteristic X and that they voted for Bush then a Dem focusing on changing their mind on who to vote for the next time is going to have little success. Aren't campaigns really about which areas to ignore?
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
May 9, 2007 1:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I agree that ease of registration and ease of actually voting should be key to the Democratic strategy.
Mark makes a compelling case when he points out that:
"Penn . . declare[s] that a certain voter category of his own devising is "the key" to the election because it could go either way: soccer moms, office park dads, wired workers, etc., or in his corporate work, "Mom-fluentials."
"that form of analysis rests on two . . .assumptions: That almost all other demographic categories are not swingable, and that the electorate cannot be expanded -- that is, that non-voters cannot be made voters."
More and more of those disenfranchised "non-voters" should become part of a progressive Democratic party base.
Penn's favorite targets are the suburbanites that Clinton's New Democrats set their caps for in the nineties. This is when the Democratic party lost its way.
It is very disappointing to see Hillary repeating the mistakes of the past.
May 9, 2007 2:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for this, Mr. Schmitt. I'd rate this a tenner if there was a button to do so with.
Keep your vorpal blade going Snicker-Snack!
aMike
May 9, 2007 2:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are moving the goalposts.
Quoting you:
"all without a single piece of data to support them"
Now you say:
"There are two pieces of data in that op-ed, and neither is from Penn's own research."
Ooohhh... First it was no data then it's penn's own research. I see. I see you moving the goalposts. I see that if penn had used his own polls you'd have a problem with that.
"Neither bit of data supports the main claim of the op-ed, which is that women, and independent women in particular"
The wapo article you link to:
The Power of Hillary
"Hillary Clinton really is one of the weakest . . . nominees with whom the Democrats could be saddled."
"Democrats are worried sick about her chances."
"Just give someone else a chance, so we in the Democratic Party can elect a Democrat."
"She cannot possibly, possibly win."
Yada, yada, yada.
We've heard all this "Hillary can't win stuff" before. In fact, the quotes above aren't from recent weeks but from six years ago, when many pundits -- and Democrats -- said there was no way that Hillary could get elected to the Senate. She won by 12 percentage points.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/30/AR2006063001478.html
The main claim of the article is Hillary can win. To support that carville and penn point to a Hillary win. They make their point and case right up front. Then provide data from a poll, not done by penn, to support their claim that Hillary can win. I’d guess if penn did his own poll some would question that.
Deep into the article after quoting an abc/post poll they say Hillary is popular with Democratic women and even independent women. carville and penn say Hillary is popular. In real time I said bullroar! dag nab it I'm gonna look up that abc/post poll they keep quoting from. And sure enough carville and penn were accurate.
Quoting you:
“the other involves the percentages of women and Hispanics in the electorate”
carville and penn from wapo article you link to:
“Fifty-four percent of voters are female. George Bush increased his vote with only two groups between 2000 and 2004: women and Hispanics.”
Now lets cut to the chase. You are calling penn a liar, and worse. So if that quote sounds bogus to you why didn’t look it up and nail penn. I’ll tell you why: It’s not bogus. Penn was accurate again.
I could spend a week taking apart that nation article you link to. But I’ll just mention a couple of things.
berman:
"In a White House where polling is virtually a religion," the Washington Post reported in 1996, "Penn is the high priest." He became known as the "most powerful man in Washington you've never heard of."
You wanna bet that was ceci connelly? Do ya? When you have to quote somebody like a connelly to make your point: You don’t have a point.
berman:
“The firm has represented everyone from the Argentine military junta to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India,”
In 1984! Penn didn’t work for the company until 21 years later. Not until dec. 2005! Good gravy! OK berman is just telling us how horrible the company was in 1984. He’s not saying penn had anything to do with it. Berman is not trying to smear penn with something as dumb as that. No really berman isn’t.
And lastly Burson-Marsteller donate 57% of their pac money to repubs during the 2006 election cycle! OMG! A mega corp donated a total of $64,000 to polls between 2004 and 2006. $9,000 more to repubs than dems. The 5th largest ad agency in the world donated only $64,000 to polls. If only every mega corp donated so little the world would be a better place. Oh and for half the 2006 election cycle penn did not work for B-M.
I could spend a week setting berman straight.
Look, I have to vote for dem candidate in 2008. I'd like to get the facts about each one. You aren't helping. Just say'n.
May 9, 2007 2:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I guess I don't even want to like her, but it's a similar dynamic where every piece of news seems to confirm my suspicions: she stands for nothing but her own 'career.'
What's the appeal of Hillary? I can't see it at all.
May 9, 2007 3:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
In my original post, I quoted several specific assertions that Penn and Carville made regarding Clinton and women, and said that they provided no data to support those assertions. That is true. In this post, I quoted one of the assertions and linked back to the older post. What I said remains true. I also said in the original post that I did in fact believe that Senator Clinton could do particularly well with women, and that if I were a pollster I would want to test that idea out. I thought it was weird that an actual pollster would not offer more than "we think" to support that assertion.
I don't hold the view that "Hillary can't win," especially having lived in New York and watched her 2000 campaign with admiration. I just think she is ill-served by a pollster with a very limited and compromised view of political possibilities.
May 9, 2007 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
"lower-income, primarily urban, heavily black and hispanic, younger, and largely female voters..."
The problem there is that there is probably not much you can do at any reasonable cost to get this group to vote.
I believe the Democrats have a broader problem in that they no longer have any "brand" at all which makes it a piece of cake for Republicans to brand us any way they choose.
Most voters aren't single issue. Democrats need to articulate a philosophy that can hit people on a variety of issues. I'd brand it "quality of life". You ought to be able to develop an agenda around that to sell to suburban voters.
But we have to develop the philosophy, agenda, issues, policies over time. Instead, we wage elections over how do we focus group and triangulate an electorate custom designed for Hillary or fill in the blank. That has no coattails. What elected Clintion, couldn't elect Gore. Now, if Gore had been fighting all along for his passion, the environment, and woven that into a broader agenda for suburban voters who do care about their environment, who knows how different the last 8 years could have been.
May 9, 2007 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: They're faith is not threatened by drug resistant germs, but it is threatened if God didn't create the world in six days six thousand years ago.
Are your family members really Young Earth Creationists? That is a fairly rare opinion even among those who reject evolution, since the weight of teh evidence for the Earth's age is simply overwhelming. (And as such it is really is a Flat Eearth Society sort of thing). On the other hand you will find many, many people who assert that evolution is not purposeless and random, but rather that God is in the driver's seat. I don't see any reason to stigmatize or struggle (politically) against this notion as it's a perfectly respectable philosophical (not scientific) idea and can be held without any damage to the actual science of biology or any political consequence.
May 9, 2007 4:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
[Clinton] is ill-served by a pollster with a very limited and compromised view of political possibilities.
Perhaps, less than meets the eye.
Penn's primary function in the Clinton campaign is to provide, by his presence, a marker which potential corporate donors will find comforting. There's no reason to think -- especially this early on -- that he's not fulfilling his role.
May 9, 2007 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
May 9, 2007 7:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
hadenough is vehement. hadenough is quite convincing, in citing the specifics which undermine if not demolish this post.
But hadenough loses me with the vitriolic "you people elected Bush twice" rant.
Listen up, hadenough: Bush was never elected; the 2000 election was stolen and the 2004 one was rigged---tho it is possible Bush did win the national popular vote in 2004 as Gore did in 2000.
What I and so many others want to know is why the Democratic leadership rolled over for those crimes. It wasn't just the Dem candidates who were robbed and cheated, it was the American people. And if the Democratic leaders haven't got the intelligence to understand that, and the courage to fight back against this criminal clique that usurped the government, and the good sense to use their (temporary) Congressional majority to raise the issue of free and fair elections---openly and aggressively---then past is prologue and the outcome in 2008 will also be unhappy.
This is exactly what the US attorney purge and the corruption of the Justice Department is all about!!!
All the polling and posturing and focus grouping and triangulation and so on, indulged in by Mrs. Clinton and the other candidates, is just so much shadow boxing.
We need pollsters a lot less than we need leaders. We need a leader whose principles flow from coherent convictions, and who has the ability to express those ideas and communicate them to the people.
Yes, you can win as an opportunist and a chameleon and a finger-to-the-wind triangulator---it has happened more often than not, perhaps. But those electoral triumphs come at a high price to democracy, and they often turn sour sooner rather than later.
It doesn't take a pollster to get the pulse of the people, by the way. Skilled politicians have always been able to sense the lay of the land just by listening to a cross section of ordinary citizens, unscientifically--but accurately.
And all across America, the reports are the same: Hillary Clinton is the WEAKEST candidate the Democrats could possibly nominate next year. This isn't bias. It is truthful reporting of what ordinary, non-"political-junkie" citizens are saying.
We have several execellent choices---Sen. Edwards, Sen. Obama, Sen. Clinton are most prominent---but tell me again WHY SHOULD WE NOMINATE THE POLITICALLY WEAKEST CANDIDATE?
May 10, 2007 1:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why is this important this week but not last week?
I'll answer the question: hillary's new lead in the polls.
there may actually be some good points here, i don't know. if we're turning the question away from "MARK PENN THE EVIL DARK LORD OF CORPRATIST UNION BUSTING!!!" to the more analytical and fair question of
"is hillary well served by a pollster/consultant who seems to make broad conclusions with a dearth of date?"...
that's interesting, but i would add this to THAT sort of discussion.
I personally did not thing hillary should apologize for her IWR vote, I understood it, I didn't begrudge people who voted "no" they did so for their reasons, and hillary had her reasons, and nobody can distill a conflicted view down to an absolute binary, but that's a what a vote forces one to do (see Obama's vote to confirm Rice, Feingold's vote to confirm Rice) so that was just my preference, there was nothting there to apologize for. it's bush's war. i really had no idea how prevalent my view on this was in the rest of america. i suspected that the vote and hillary's refusal to apologize for it may be her undoing.
and then a couple months ago. out came the polls. amongst democratic voters only something like 30 per cent felt she should apologize. the rest either understood it or simply didn't care so much either way.
and what we also know is that penn advised hillary not to apologize and the clinton camp was divided on this.
so far. edwards apology hasn't done much to help him. hillary's refusal to apologize hasn't hurt her as much as people (bloggers said it would). we'll see what happens as we go further down this road.
but for now. penn was right on this one.
i think that might provide one answer to the question posed above.
although it would have been less suspicious if this wasn't posted after the latest polls showing clinton's post-debate bump. three other blogs have suddenly picked this up as well.
but we've known about penn's business dealing for years now.
hmmmmm. interesting.
kind of like how we knew carville was showing up on cnn without cnn disclosing his services (a mailing as far as i could tell) to the clinton campaign for months prior to carville pointing out that obama blew the health care forum in nevada. but it was after carville pointed out obama didn't do so hot that cnn was finally forced to disclose carville's relationship to hillary. which always seemed obvious to me anyway, go figure.
anyway. carville was right. obama didn't do so well at the health care forum. and hillary did great.
but instead of just admitting that, we saw the carville dustup.
now. instead of just admitting that clinton did exceptionally well in the debate, we see a rash of posts about mark penn.
i would ask if obama or edwards are well served by a netroots that partakes in such denial?
May 10, 2007 1:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
edit above: Feingold's vote to confirm Roberts.
May 10, 2007 1:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'll make one more attempt at introducing sense to this argument:
1. I don't hate Senator Clinton. I know her, I know many people who are close to her politically and personally; I think she'd be a fine president. If I don't vote for her in the primary, it will be because another candidate is more appealing to me, not because I dislike Clinton. In fact, I doubt you will find a critical word about Clinton in anything I have written. I have developed a particular obsession with Penn for the reasons I develop in the last paragraphs of my post -- I think he offers a narrow, uninspiring and very corporate politics which has had too much influence on Dem politics generally.
2. Penn and Carville did not cite any data to support their claims regarding Clinton's appeal to independent women last July. That point is irrefuted. That a poll they cited elsewhere in the article may also have had some data to support that point is entirely irrelevant. So might a dozen other polls. (The data apparently is that three in ten Republican women "would consider" voting for Clinton, as opposed to two in ten men -- which doesn't quite prove the "thrilled with" point, and isn't compared with any other potential Democrat.) I argued last July that since Penn was a pollster, he was uniquely positioned to find out more about Clinton's actual appeal to women, and it was odd that he did not do so.
May 10, 2007 4:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
May 10, 2007 5:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Pollsters exist to convince us that they're important and to add another insulating layer between the candidate and the people.
Their expiration date is past and there will soon be a lot of unemployed pollsters after 2008.
And people are tired of the Clintons, the Bushes, and all of the old pasty white guys on the GOP side. So they can take polls all they want, but the candidates still won't get it; the public is tired of them and their approaches.
May 10, 2007 5:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree. I would argue one of the things that made the theft possible was "liberals" trashing the Dem candidate. Some of the most vicious and just wacky attacks on Gore were from "liberals." And "liberal" pundits, thinkers, writers that weren't busy trashing Gore were busy ignoring their peers trashing of Gore. In 1997-1998 Gore was a boyscout. By 1999-2000 Gore was a big fat liar that needed a girl to tell how to be a man. At best "liberal" pundits stared into the air. At worst they mounted the most vicous attacks on Gore. There might be excepts but that was the rule.
Rinse and repeat with Kerry in 2004.
Now heaading into 2008 there we go again.
"And all across America, the reports are the same: Hillary Clinton is the WEAKEST candidate the Democrats could possibly nominate next year. This isn't bias. It is truthful reporting of what ordinary, non-"political-junkie" citizens are saying."
That's a statement with no supporting data. And I'm not sure what you mean by "And all across America, the reports are the same: Hillary Clinton is the WEAKEST candidate..." Would "reprots" meani polling?
Here are a bunch of polls:
http://www.pollingreport.com/wh08gen.htm
Hillary appears to be doing pretty well. Dispite being trashed endless by the "liberal media" and even a lot of "liberal" pundits.
What I see happening is the same thing that happened in 2000 and 2004. "Liberals" mindlessly trashing dems they don't like. If penn is most evil then surely there's no need to make stuff up.
May 10, 2007 5:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps just my misperception, but it seems this thread has gone a bit haywire. Mark S. made a truly valuable contribution, in tempering the demonizing of Mark Penn while also suggesting how a good pollster can be a bad advisor, driving aspects of a DLC agenda that are particularly unfortunate for both electoral politics and liberals like myself.
Somehow, it seems to have turned into a thread about Clinton's chances in a way that gets people ticked off about interpretation of a relatively minor side point. And what in goodness name does someone like Mark S., who is slightly suspicious of the party's shift to the right but a centrist relative to much of us here, have to do with some alleged idea that liberals have given us Bush? Indeed, I can't make much sense of that idea, but mostly it seems to me just that someone's sore point has allowed a rant or two to hijack the thread, I'm afraid.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
May 10, 2007 6:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
You mean trying to win office? Might the mistake be those who think they know America and what Americans actually want than the Clintons?
Daniel A. Greenbaum
May 10, 2007 8:07 AM | Reply | Permalink