HRC chief strategist, Penn, helped reelect Menachem Begin, the first Likud PM of Israel...

Emit

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Sun Mar-23-08 11:31 PM
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HRC chief strategist, Penn, helped reelect Menachem Begin, the first Likud PM of Israel...

and Blair and Lieberman and Gore, who ended up firing him.

Clinton's PowerPointer
With Data and Slides, a Pollster Guides Campaign Strategy

By Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 30, 2007; A01

It was fairly simple, Mark J. Penn said calmly to Vice President Al Gore, reporting the findings of an exhaustive survey he had conducted in the early stages of the 2000 presidential campaign. Voters liked Gore's policies. They just didn't like Gore.

Gore laughed, according to people who attended the meeting. He had heard that before. But the vice president, worried about the effect President Bill Clinton's scandals might have on his campaign, had another question for his pollster: Was there any evidence of this "Clinton fatigue" that people kept talking about?

"I'm not tired of him," Penn replied. "Are you?"

It was a flippant response -- and the final straw for Gore, who had long been wary of Penn and concerned that his real loyalty was to Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. His senior advisers agreed, regarding Penn as arrogant and controlling, someone who pushed the boundaries of his job by dispensing strategic advice rather than simply interpreting data. Shortly after the meeting with Gore, Penn was fired.

~snip~

To Penn, 'Strength Is Critical'

In their $5 million Georgetown mansion, Penn and his wife, Nancy Jacobson, a former staff member for Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) who is now a fundraiser with the Clinton campaign, run something of a salon for like-minded friends. They recently threw a book party for Jeffrey Goldberg, the New Yorker writer, to celebrate the release of his memoir on Israel. On another occasion, they hosted David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist, for a dinner party and political discussion.

Penn has deep roots in the national security wing of the Democratic Party, along with other centrist Democrats -- some of them Jewish and pro-Israel, like Penn -- who saw the merits of invading Iraq before the war began.

"Penn has always believed that strength is critical for running the country, and that people want to have a president who's going to be willing to defend the country -- that's the number one criteria," said Al From, the chief executive of the Democratic Leadership Council, who considers Penn a friend.

Penn gained his foreign policy expertise working on numerous campaigns overseas, especially in Israel. In 1981, he and business partner Doug Schoen helped reelect Menachem Begin, one of the most right-wing prime ministers in the country's history, and emerged with a new outlook on the Middle East. "We got a chance to experience firsthand the perils and possibilities that the state of Israel presents," Schoen said in an interview.

In a pivotal moment, the pollsters watched as Begin launched airstrikes against a developing Iraqi nuclear facility, Osirak, in the middle of the campaign. "In the end, bombing the Osirak reactor became a metaphor for the type of man that Begin was and the steps he was willing to take to safeguard Israel's security," Schoen wrote in his autobiography, "The Power of the Vote."

Ever since, Penn has been a prominent advocate of conveying strength in foreign policy. As recently as the 2004 presidential contest, Penn argued that Democrats would lose if they failed to close the "security gap." His client list includes prominent backers of the Iraq war, particularly Lieberman, whose presidential campaign Penn helped run in 2004, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose campaign he advised when Blair won a historic third term in 2005.

~snip~

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/29/AR2007042901661.html?hpid=artslot