Poison Penn

[babylonsister]

Poison Penn by Michelle Cottle
The complicated and varied reasons why the Clintons held on to their chief strategist for as long as they did.
Post Date Tuesday, April 08, 2008



By the end, it was hard to count all the reasons the members of Team Hillary wanted to see Mark Penn laid low. The rumpled, portly pollster's apparently unpardonable sin was his March 31 meeting with the Colombian ambassador to discuss the efforts of Penn's PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, to procure a trade pact specifically opposed by Senator Clinton. But Penn had been a focus of animus within the Hillary campaign from day one. Famous for his inability to play well with others, Penn is near universally regarded as rough, arrogant, antisocial, controlling, manipulative, brutally ambitious, and occasionally downright abusive--a hurler of cell phones, pagers, and Chinese food.

Even before his ill-fated sit-down with the Colombians, Penn's work at Burson (which services such controversial clientele as defense contractors, drug companies, Big Oil, and Big Tobacco) frequently served as a lightning rod for bad press and attacks from the Democratic base. And as Hillary's primary fortunes faltered, Penn's storied message savvy also came under fire, with the baying for his head growing ever louder inside the campaign and from outside donors. For months, the joke around Washington was that, in all of the Clinton campaign, Penn had exactly two allies: Bill and Hillary. Now, as his public spanking is greeted with hardcore, widespread schadenfreude, the only question being asked about his fall from the Clintons' grace seems to be, "What took them so long?" The explanations offered by a variety of Hillarylanders, erstwhile Penn colleagues, and party veterans speak as much to the predilections and peculiarities of Bill and Hillary as to any particular talents Penn himself possesses.

Ask any member of Team Hillary what has bound Penn to the Clintons, and you'll receive a mini-history lesson on the myriad trials he has seen them through, starting with Bill's 1996 reelection. In the wake of the disastrous 1994 midterms, Penn and then-partner Doug Schoen were quietly brought into the White House by Dick Morris to help with some course correction in advance of the race. As one former Clintonite and Penn defender explains it, the president, having been pulled too far toward the big-government, lefty populism of some early advisers, was searching for a way back to the center, and the right-leaning Penn helped Clinton telegraph centrist values to the public and sell voters on policy ideas both large (welfare reform, balanced budgets) and small (school uniforms). When Morris was forced from the campaign over revelations he had been spending his nights at Washington's Jefferson Hotel sucking the toes of a call girl--news of which broke inopportunely at the Dems' nominating convention--Penn slid into the role of Invaluable Advisor. At campaign's end, he received the lion's share of credit for making Clinton the first Democratic president to win a second term since FDR.

Then came Monica. Clinton needed his pollster to float possible damage-control strategies without everyone else around the White House knowing (and leaking) what was going on; for Penn to do this, the president had to entrust him with some of the juicier details of his predicament in order to prepare for the worst. "So you're starting from a point of confidentiality that nobody else has," notes a Penn colleague from that time. As impeachment loomed, Penn counseled Clinton to stay focused on reassuring Americans that he was still hard at work for them, partisan distractions be damned. When at last Clinton emerged from the firestorm singed but alive, Penn once more enjoyed the credit. By then, he had proved himself not only strategically savvy, but also loyal and discreet--two attributes absolutely necessary for access into Hillary's inner-circle in particular.

And so the relationship grew. When Hillary decided to run for Senate, Bill urged her to go with Penn. When the Clintons suffered a string of PR disasters in Bill's first few months out of office--the Marc Rich pardon, the furnishings allegedly removed from the White House, the cash-for-pardons scheme by Hillary's brother Hugh--Penn served as a source of stability as he spearheaded the effort to repair their images. By this time, says one long-time Clinton insider, "he was like a crutch."


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