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Mark Penn Needs to Shut Up
By Jeff Fecke | February 16, 2008
If you’re an Obama supporter, there’s a certain amount of schadenfreude with each utterance from anti-union hack, pollster, and Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn. If you’re a Clinton supporter…well, you have to really wonder why he’s still employed.
Penn, as you likely know, has been sharing with anyone who will listen that none of the states Obama has won have counted, because they…uh…look! Zombies! Penn has also made the tremendously obnoxious argument that the Clinton campaign will try to wrangle enough Superdelegates to win, even if she loses the popular vote and pledged delegate count, because the voters are idiots, evidently.
Now, Penn has made what has to be the dumbest argument yet:
Winning Democratic primaries is not a qualification or a sign of who can win the general election. If it were, every nominee would win because every nominee wins Democratic primaries.
This is, in fact, true. However, losing Democratic primaries is strongly correlated with not being able to win elections. Only Joe Lieberman tests that theory, but then again, he isn’t a Democrat any more.
Look, Mark: Hillary Clinton is a smart woman and a skilled politician, and if you had chosen to run a more humble campaign based on her skill and talent, rather than an “inevitability” campaign that stressed that nobody could beat her, she might be winning right now. But she isn’t. As for your plan to steal the nomination at the convention (for that is what it is, after all), Al Gore and other Democratic party elders are making a point of declaring their neutrality, the better to anoint the winner in pledged delegates when a clear winner exists. If that clear winner is Clinton, she should get the nomination. If not, well, she shouldn’t. This is not rocket science, Mark.
Look, you can still pull this off, but it’s going to involve your candidate scoring an upset in Wisconsin and big wins in Pennsylvania and Ohio. It’s going to require your candidate to find a way to finish in a near-tie in delegates, and to be able to at least point to a popular-vote win to justify her receiving your party’s nomination. It’s also going to require you to shut up, and stop attacking your party’s primary system. Because most Democrats — Obama supporters and Clinton supporters — really just want the nominee of our party to have earned it. If Hillary earns it through the ballot box, then she earns it. But if she earns it through a diminishing of the nomination process and a denigration of the Democratic party as a whole…well, the nomination she gets will be a diminished, denigrated nomination. And that’s not going to get her into the White House in November.
Topics: Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton | 5 Comments »
February 17th, 2008 at 10:05 am
[...] well-read blog), and yet again here at Blog of the Moderate Left (and for you German speakers, go one post higher and you can see the German word Schadenfreude used in English – so I wasn’t lying when I said [...]
February 17th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Great post. There’s an addition, even more serious, affect these comments have on her campaign. And that is they reflect on her leadership. Voters have really only had two recent examples of Hillary’s record when it comes to leadership and integrity. And those are her handling of her primary campaign and her position on the Michigan and Florida primaries. And in both cases she falls far short of Barack Obama. The final irony of “actions not words” Hillary may be that it is only her policy rhetoric in which she measures up.
February 17th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Spot on.
One of the more interesting aspects of this primary cycle has been the large turnouts when compared with previous years and especially when compared with the Republicans’ current turnouts.
So winning Democratic primaries certainly means a lot more now than it did in the past decade.
February 18th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
“Shut up”? You write that a lot – I hope you don’t say it as much in real life. You might enjoy the link from your favorite National Review about your favorite feminist, Christina Hoff Sommers.
Whether your arguments are right or wrong, do you really think you’re going to persuade anyone to your point of view?
When you were younger did you ever stick your fingers in your ears and sing “lalalalala…”?
February 18th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Oops, “the link above” refers to the hyperlink attached to my handle closette, if that wasn’t clear. Go ahead, you know you want to click on it.!