Mark Penn's Bloated Carcass Thrown Under Clinton Campaign Bus

Hillary Clinton hasn't even lost the nomination yet, but that hasn't kept her underlings from turning on each other like a pack of angry gerbils. And now that they don't have Patti Solis Doyle to kick around anymore , who's the next target? Why, it's the "message guru" who's so good at what he does that nobody understands him!

Tragically misunderstood Mark Penn might seem like an unctuous creep whose "microtrends" strategy is the lamest pop-culture approach to statistics sinceThe Tipping Point. But that's only half the story.

"There was a misunderstanding that this campaign was about small things. It never was," Penn told theNew York Observerone day before his candidate spent 16 minutes of a national debate reviewing the intricate details of her health plan and then pointed out the important difference between "reject" and "denounce."

It seems the campaign is in fact a victim oforganizational failures: a failure to get boots on the ground and manage costs effectively while Mark Penn was busy putting out brilliant messages that were misunderstood.

As he put it, his strategy had succeeded in the "biggest message-oriented states."

And, by implication, the political ground and money game, run by former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, her deputy Mike Henry and longtime Clinton loyalist and Penn foe Harold Ickes, ruined it for Mrs. Clinton in "organization-driven" states, where she suffered defeats in "a series of caucuses that generated tremendous momentum for Obama."

Penn is also disappointed that the public "misunderstands" how much money his public relations company is getting from the Clinton campaign. He would also like America to know that he developed the wildly unpopular slogan for Tony Blair's last campaign--"Forward, Not Back"--which British journalist Andrew Rawnsley wrote "is as uplifting as 'Open Other End,' 'This Way Up' and 'Now Wash Your Hands.'"

 Micro Mark [New York Observer]