Like everyone else this morning, I too am amazed by Mark Penn's Republican strategy for the Democratic nominating process.

Beyond Ickes's point:

"How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?"

<Answer:  Penn = Idiot>

is the much larger question raised by the next sentence: 

And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories.

It's one thing for an influential bufoon to put out a ridiculous, erroneous premise (I see it every day on the job).  It's another for it to go unchallenged all that time.  One answer, of course, is that Penn WAS unassailable with the Clintons.  I have no idea.  But I think a deeper explanation is the following:  the conviction by the people in that room, not the least Harold Ickes, that strategy was IRRELEVANT.  And it was irrelevant because Hillary's nomination was INEVITABLE.  I never thought "inevitability" was just a campaign strategy -- I thought it was a collective delusion in the Clinton campaign.  After all, she is Hillary Clinton, talented and admired pol with a huge following of devoted fans.  Hillary Clinton, whose husband's presidency now looks even better than it actually was when viewed through the miasma of 8 years of Bush.  How could the competition for the nomination -- an ambulance chaser with big hair, a Clinton hanger-on/over-achiever with rumors of skirt chasing, a couple of bloviating old senators, and a scrawny black kid from Chicago -- possibly present any serious threat to her nomination?  Given that, why bother with a coherent election strategy, or a truly broad-based fund-raising strategy, or a competent GOTV operation?  Just the checks from the usual fat cat suspects and a few big victories, then her pygmy competitors scurry like rats, and she coasts regally across the finish line?

From the vantage point of January 2007, it was very hard to see how Clinton could lose.  However, one of the very few things I've learned in my career (such as it is) is the following:  no matter how good you are, convincing other people to make a decision in your favor requires thoughtful preparation, careful planning, a realistic strategy, lots of hard work and constant adjustment.  Clever (but not necessarily the smartest) students figure this out early on in school:  "what does Teacher really want, and how best can I produce it?"

The Obama campaign thinks like that.  They KNOW he's good, very good, but they don't let that blind them (too often, at least).  His talents are not a SUBSTITUTE for careful planning and meticulous execution; rather, his gifts are a foundation on which to build a viable strategy.

So, the Clinton campaign failed because it listened to Mark Penn, but the reason it listened to Mark Penn was the underlying hubris and conceit of Clinton and her inner circle.  Who needs a strategy, when you are INEVITABLE?