DRESS HER UP IN A GENERAL'S SUIT

Marc Penn strikes me as an idiot. His firm has collected millions of dollars from the Hillary campagn and this is the stratgy he comes to:

DRESS HER UP IN A GENERAL'S SUIT

Penn's strategy for the next two weeks is to portray HRC as the Commander in Chief. I suspect this means a tour of ground zero AND HAVE HER LAND ON A CARRIER?

Click on Penn's image for a message from the Message Man

Features > September 14, 2007

Trending Toward Inanity

Mark Penn’s new book, Microtrends, is so epically awful that it could take the entire polling industry down with it

By Ezra Klein

If you wanted to ruin the political career of Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief pollster and strategist, here would be one way to do it: First, create some sort of artifact bearing his name that you could use to tank his reputation. A book would do perfectly. Title it something buzz-wordy and superficial, like Microtrends, though perhaps that’s too heavy-handed. Fill it with vapid koans, like “small is the new big” and “the biggest movements in America today are small.” To make it seem authentic, you’d want to ape Penn’s long-standing affection for combining demographic salami-slicing with cutesy-naming (this is the man who foisted “Soccer Moms” upon our weary lexicon), making each short chapter an exposition of ever-more absurd groups—think “Archery Moms,” “Old New Dads,” and “Ardent Amazons.” Finally, assert their importance through wild and empirically unsupported speculations. That last would be the key: You’d want the methodology so wild and slipshod, so transparently flawed, that no one would trust the analyst ever again.

From the National Review:

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.

On a conference call, top strategist Mark Penn just told reporters that in the next two weeks Hillary Clinton will go after Barack Obama on the issue of who is better qualified to be commander-in-chief — and Penn suggested that Clinton would be a better commander of the nation's armed forces than both Obama and John McCain. "She is the only person in this race who is both ready to be commander-in-chief and would end the Iraq war and start to bring troops home within 60 days, compared to both Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain," Penn told reporters.

Later, Penn made it clear that Clinton will push the commander-in-chief issue in coming days. "The Republican nominee has extensive credibility in this area, and the Democrat is going to need to be commander-in-chief," Penn said. Obama has "relatively no experience in national security," Penn continued, an issue that "is going to be reflected in the debates that we have over the next couple of weeks."

UPDATE: Later in the call, the Clinton team was asked whether the not-qualified-to-be-commander-in-chief criticism of Obama was going too far, given that it would be used by Republicans against Obama if Obama is the Democratic nominee against John McCain. "We don't believe that he is the one who will face John McCain," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said. "This is a legitimate question that Sen. Obama would face if he were the nominee, and it is a question that he is facing as a result of criticism from Sen. McCain now, so I think it's perfectly appropriate."