Mark Penn

Michael Bloomberg wants to hear where Barack Obama stands on the issue of free trade, he said earlier today, adding that he thinks John McCain has “a better record on this issue.”

Bloomberg was speaking across the street from City Hall, where the Consumer Electronics Association launched a nationwide bus tour advocating free trade with Colombia, among other countries.

“I think that John McCain has a better record on this issue than Barack Obama,” Bloomberg said. McCain, Bloomberg said, advocates “trading with the only ally we have left in Latin America, namely Colombia.”

“I’d like to hear a lot more from him about how he thinks we could reopen NAFTA without becoming a big loser in that,” the mayor added.  read more »

Before a book signing in Washington on May 22, Mark Penn fielded some questions from journalist Carol Joynt about the Clinton campaign.

About 20 seconds into this clip, Penn says “Hillary’s coalition has continued to strengthen.”

At an event in New York this morning former Bill Clinton aide Paul Begala sharply criticized Mark Penn. One attendee who I spoke with today added that Begala, employing a Cajun accent, also quoted a swipe taken by Jim Carville at the now former chief strategist.

'How come the guy who calls himself chief strategist doesn't have a strategy?' said Begala, channeling Carville, according to the attendee.

On a conference call among high-level Clinton staffers on the morning of April 7, longtime adviser Mark Penn was arguing about a proposed advertisement for Hillary Clinton.

“Mark, Mark, Mark,” said Geoff Garin, a pollster who had taken over some of Mr. Penn’s duties as chief strategist, as Mr. Penn continued to press his point. “A decision has already been made.”

The mighty Mark Penn had been shot down.  read more »

The day after the campaign announced Penn's titular demotion, it is not clear yet exactly what influence he has lost.

Marc Ambinder reported that Penn participated this morning on an internal campaign conference call, suggesting the highly plausible possibility that his loss of the right to be called “chief strategist” was more about cauterizing the Colombia mess than empowering Howard Wolfson and Geoff Garin to cut him out of the decision-making loop.  read more »

In July 2007, the Clinton campaign’s then-chief-strategist Mark Penn sat in his gleaming white and aquarium-walled chief executive’s office at the global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller talking about a mistake he thought Howard Wolfson had made in responding to comments from a prominent Obama supporter.

“It’s very important in politics not to make the same mistake too many times,” Penn said at the time.  read more »

Mark Penn has stepped down as the Clinton campaign's chief strategist, but his firm will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign.

The campaign's message strategy will now be headed up by pollster Geoff Garin and communications director Howard Wolfson.  read more »

Trailing in pledged delegates and with the popular vote in doubt, the Clinton campaign has apparently come up with another metric to convince superdelegates that there is a justification for going against the tide: Primary delegates.

At the end of today's Clinton conference call (during which Phil Singer said that if the Clinton campaign were a baseball team, they have a "great leftfielder in Mark Penn") NBC's Chuck Todd observed that Penn seemed to be using the term "primary delegates" more often, and he asked if that was a talking point the campaign might not be looking to use when making their pitch to superdelegates.

"If we are ahead in primary delegates—we're within 16, with a lot of primaries left to go—that's a factor," said Penn.  read more »

Slightly but significantly, Ed Rendell has separated himself from the Clinton campaign's assertion that Barack Obama can't win Pennsylvania–and the general election, for that matter–in the fall, telling MSNBC that Obama would be able to defeat John McCain in the Keystone State.  read more »

The Clinton campaign chastised Barack Obama this morning for what they said is his shunning of Pennsylvania, a state that the campaign argues a Democratic candidate needs to carry to win the general election.

On the call, according to Howard Wolfson, were a "great lineup of guests," including Governor Ed Rendell, who talked about "the Obama campaign's attempt to diminish the importance of the state" and Mayor Michael Nutter, who said he would "fire" a staffer who wrote a memo lowering expectations in Pennsylvania.

Mark Penn was on the call too, to make sure the campaign's main message was heard: "[Obama] doesn't seem to be able to pass the commander-in-chief test."

When asked during the question-and-answer period whether the intensifying rhetoric between the Clinton and Obama campaigns is destructive to Democratic chances in the general election, Rendell argued it was actually a good thing, because it takes attention away from John McCain.

More after the jump.  read more »

Michael Bloomberg drew some fire last week for donating $500,000 to state Senate Republicans just as Eliot Spitzer is trying to help Democrats take over the Senate.

A minor-but-interesting side-detail about that working relationship: As late as 2006, the New York State Senate Republican Campaign Committee was paying thousands of dollars in consulting fees to the firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, which was co-founded by Hillary Clinton’s top strategist Mark Penn.  read more »

Harold Ickes definitely doesn’t buy the argument that Mark Penn isn’t responsible for everything that has happened to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“Mark Penn has run this campaign,” said Ickes in a brief phone interview this morning. “Besides Hillary Clinton, he is the single most responsible person for this campaign.

“Now, he has been circumscribed to some extent by Maggie Williams,” said Ickes, who then pointed out that that was only a recent development.  read more »

Mark Penn thinks that people have the wrong impression about him, and about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“I think that people misunderstand,” he said in a 45-minute phone interview Monday evening.  read more »

The argument that the constant carping about Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been a function of an Obama-friendly, process-obsessed media is well and good. But how, then, to explain the deeply held dissatisfaction of an old Clinton loyalist like Leon Panetta?

In an interview with The Observer, Mr. Panetta compared Mrs. Clinton’s top strategist, Mark Penn, to Karl Rove, suggested that the Clinton campaign had totally underestimated Barack Obama’s appeal, and complained about the overall lack of planning that he said had characterized the former First Lady’s bid to return to the White House.

Mr. Panetta, who served as chief of staff in the White House from July 1994 to January 1997, and who has contributed $2000 to Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, complained that Mr. Penn “is a political pollster from the past.”

”I never considered him someone who would run a national campaign for the presidency,” he said.  read more »

Here’s more from The Strand last night, where Mark Penn politiely declined to answer a very long question from one member of the audience.

Yesterday on a Clinton campaign conference call Mark Penn argued against the reliability of some recent polls.  read more »

Mark Penn, the top strategist for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, will be giving a reading from his book Microtrends at 7 p.m. tonight at the Strand.

Clinton’s campaign recently underwent a change in leadership, although Penn is still in the same role.

It's not just the $5 million loan.

Another sign that Hillary Clinton's campaign is scrambling to find its footing after Feb. 5 is their insistence again today in an open letter to Obama campaign manager David Plouffe on more debates.  read more »

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe did not deny, when asked, that Mark Penn’s characterization of Obama’s speech yesterday as an attack on Hillary Clinton was off-base.

"Well you know that was an important speech yesterday," Plouffe said during a conference call with reporters, adding that Obama was making "a strong case for his candidacy” during the speech.  read more »

Hillary Clinton’s top strategist Mark Penn said today, “The search for delegates, I think, is going to go straight through to the convention,” a shift from the once-commonly held notion that a nominee would be known after New York, California and 20 other states holding Democratic primaries on February 5.

On a conference call with reporters this afternoon, Penn was asked what benchmarks the campaign hoped to achieve.

“Again, I think it’s a search for delegates. I think the system is set up to be an extremely competitive one.” And, “I’m not going to go through any clear benchmarks other than that the search for delegates I think is going to continue straight through to the convention.”

Which is slightly different than what Terry McAuliffe was saying earlier.

Two things became clear on a conference call held earlier by Clinton campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, communications director Howard Wolfson and chief strategist Mark Penn this morning. One: they do not want anyone to forget that Barack Obama’s national media buy means that he has ads running in Florida. Two: they are determined to get Florida and Michigan delegates seated at the national convention, despite the pledge all three top Democratic candidates took not to campaign in those states (and despite the fact that neither Barack Obama nor John Edwards were on the ballot in Michigan).

 

In her opening remarks, Solis Doyle told reporters that when the D.N.C. penalized the Florida Democratic Party by stripping them of delegates to the national convention—because they defied the national party by moving up the date of the primary—“they thought Floridians wouldn’t vote, but we can see they’re voting in record numbers.” The campaign speculates that a major turnout is an expression of not only enthusiasm and a media-saturated primary campaign, but also, “the signal that they’re sending is that they fully expect to be heard,” as Penn said.  read more »

The Clinton campaign has excoriated Barack Obama for his remarks to a Reno paper's conservative editorial board that Republican party was the "party of ideas" over the last 16 years. But it has been long thought that Bill Clinton appropriated ideas usually identified with the Republican Party during his years in office—like deficit reduction, free trade, law enforcement, and welfare reform.

I asked Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn about this in a conference call with reporters yesterday, and here is what they said:

"As someone who was a Congressional aide during the 90's," said Wolfson, "The idea that law enforcement was a Republican idea, I just think is a rewriting of history. What President Clinton enacted during the 90's was the best of Democratic ideas, the best of progressive ideas." Wolfson went on to say he was proud, as a "young person, to be working in Congress, on the Hill, for Democratic members. We enacted so many of the policies that the President put forth. And so I reject the notion that law enforcement was a Republican idea, or that the right kind of welfare reform was a Republican idea. These were good, Democratic ideas. And they were done the right way, and they significantly benefited our country.

Penn added the following:  read more »

In a conference call just now, Clinton campaign communications director Howard Wolfson said the campaign's taking down of their negative radio ad attacking Barack Obama in South Carolina was in no way a result of media pushback questioning the spot's accuracy.  read more »

The bloodletting between the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was not stanched by the end of last night’s debate in Myrtle Beach. It continued in the spin room.

Ann Lewis continued to talk about Obama’s comments about the trajectory changing force of Republican ideas to a Las Vegas editorial board.

“He said that they were the party of ideas,” she said. “Clearly in contradiction to the Democratic Party.”  read more »

Last night's stunning win for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire certainly allowed some of her campaign's top staff to breathe easier.

But whether it served as a vindication for Mark Penn's poll-driven, policy emphasizing philosophy (he pointed out to me last night that there were a lot of "economy voters" going to the polls), or a victory for the faction within the campaign which had long advocated for Clinton to show a more personal side of herself, depended on who you spoke to.

Listening to Howard Wolfson after her she won last night, it was clear what side of the argument he fell on.

More after the jump.  read more »

Perhaps no one in the Clinton campaign had more riding on the New Hamsphire results than Mark Penn, the campaigns chief strategist and pollster, who has taken heat inside and outside of the campaign for the loss in Iowa.

So what happened in New Hampshire?

“I think people started to see the real difference between the candidates as she began drawing the contrasts and then they also heard her speak from her heart,” he said. “Those two things together stopped the momentum.”  read more »

In yet another post-Iowa press conference, Hillary Clinton answered reporters’ questions in Nashua for 19 minutes, talking about everything from her vote on the war in Iraq, her meeting with Rudy Giuliani on the stage between debates last night, the cross on her bracelet, her refusal to look back at Iowa and Barack Obama’s “four pollsters.”

She shrugged off a question about her statement at a campaign event here only minutes earlier that she would not have gone to war if she had been president, saying “You know I’ve said that many times.” She added, “Clearly at the time that vote took place I said it wasn’t a vote for preemptive war.”

She once again attacked Obama and John Edwards on what she said has said is a rhetoric that does not match reality, and when asked why she waited until after losing Iowa to make those contrasts, said, “I thought it was time to draw the contrast.” New Hampshire voters, she said, were famously independent, and “They want to know answers.”

When asked how she could stand up to a movement like that surrounding Obama by running a campaign based on “Mark Penn poll-tested talking points,” she responded, “I don’t know, but I think Senator Obama has four pollsters.”  read more »

The enormous cluster of reporters surrounding Mark Penn dispelled any question as to whether last night’s debate was all about Hillary Clinton. It was.

With four Clinton spinners on the spin room floor (Penn, media consultant Mandy Grunwald, and spokesmen Jay Carson and Phil Singer) the Clinton campaign was clearly imbued with what Barack Obama might call “the fierce urgency of now.”

Here’s what Penn was saying, essentially continuing Clinton’s assault on her opponents’ change credentials.  read more »

Suddenly, the Hillary Clinton campaign sounds a lot like the Rudy Giuliani campaign.

On the campaign plane to New Hampshire after a devastating third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses-- nine percentage points behind winner Barack Obama -- chief strategist and pollster Mark Penn said, “We need to win February 5."

Speaking for more than a half-an-hour, Penn suggested that Clinton could get all the way to Feb. 5 without a single primary victory and still win the nomination.

“We are not seeing a change in the national polls whatsoever,” said Penn, echoing the Giuliani line. “There were several out today which showed a very large lead indicating the stability of her votes in the February 5 states.”  read more »

Hillary Clinton began one of her last appeals to Iowa voters by lifting Barack Obama’s signature line.

"We are fired up and we are ready to go," she said in the Starlight Building of Davenport’s Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds. Later in her speech, she talked about “hopeful, hopeful programs for the future.”

Whether the imitation was a direct expression of faltering confidence or merely a fatigue-induced slip-up, even some of her genuine admirers in the crowd couldn’t help but notice that things felt a little flat.

“It was kind of a sad contrast,” said Owen Rogal, a 59-year-old English teacher at St. Ambrose University, who had seen Obama speak that morning. “He’s got people walking around in ‘fired up’ t-shirts and I sort of felt he was my high school football coach. He elicited a much more visceral response.”  read more »

DES MOINES, Iowa—Counting down the last 10 seconds of 2007 in a local restaurant, Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff did its best to end the year on a celebratory high note.

Just hours earlier, as the press bus pulled in to Des Moines at the end of another day of solid campaign performances by Mrs. Clinton, reporters alerted the champagne-sipping traveling campaign staff to a gloating email they had just received from Barack Obama’s campaign heralding a Des Moines Register poll that showed Mr. Obama with a seven-point lead over Mrs.  read more »

LAS VEGAS—Tonight, Hillary Clinton hit back.

After weeks of withering attacks by her Democratic rivals, political missteps by her own campaign and a seeming inability to give a straight answer on the hot-button issue of driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, Ms. Clinton took the platform at a debate at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, pointed to her charcoal jacket, and said “This pantsuit—it’s asbestos,” suggesting she was ready to withstand any onslaughts.

And they started right away.  read more »

Jason Horowitz has this lengthy-but-fun dispatch from the debate last night in Pennsylvania, where much of the talk focused on Hillary Clinton's complex answer to the question of whether or not she supports Eliot Spitzer’s plan to allow illegal immigrants to obtain a driver’s license.

After the debate, Horowitz sought out Clinton advisor Mark Penn for some clarification.

From the story:   read more »

The new book my Hillary Clinton’s adviser, Mark Penn, got some airplay on Z100 this morning, when the jockeys discussed parts of Microtrends that deal with the increasing number of single women. I thumbed through my copy to find the passage:

“Assuming that about 5 percent of U.S. adults are gay (as experts claim, and polls bear out), there are something like 7.5 million gay men and 3.5 million lesbians in America. If you subtract them from the already lopsided numbers of overall men and women, you get something like 109 million straight women to 98 million straight men - for a straight sex ratio of 53 to 47.”

Why would a  political junkie like Penn care about such numbers?

“It is possible that the unfavorable straight sex ratio, discouraging as it is for women in some respects, has encouraged women to excel elsewhere. As we’ll see in the trend on Wordy Women [in chapter 2], young women outnumber young men in fields like law, public relations, and journalism. Women outvoted men 54 to 46 percent in the 2004 presidential election.”

He goes on to write:

“The impact of women can’t be overstated. In 2004, women were 54 percent of the American electorate, the highest percentage in history. Their interest in and impact on politics has been steadily increasing.

“You may recall that in 1996, Soccer Moms were the critical swing voters. Today, those Moms remain at the center of the swing vote, but they are about a decade older, and their kids are going off to college."

Mr. Penn has been drafting and interpreting meticulous and incessant surveys to furnish the Clintons with the market-tested language and policies to get them into power—and keep them there.  read more »

Allegations that Hillary Clinton’s top adviser, Mark Penn, illegally monitored the blackberry of one of his former employees have been withdrawn as part of settlement Penn struck with three additional former employees he claimed were trying to steal clients from his firm.

A spokesman for Penn’s firm Penn, Schoen & Berland, called to say the defendants “paid a substantial sum” and that the Temporary Restraining Order barring the former employees from soliciting PSB clients “has been superceded by an ongoing agreement to continue their obligation to not compete.”

Since one of the people in that agreement includes a pollster who worked on Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral campaigns, this is really good news for Mark Penn.

Which sounds like the end of the legal drama I’ve been obsessing over.

The official statement from PSB the parties involved is after the jump.

Penn, Schoen and Berland (“PSB”), Mike Berland and Mitchell Markel today announced that they had resolved their pending litigation and have agreed to the immediate dismissal of all lawsuits pending between and among them. While the terms of the settlements are confidential, they include undisclosed payments by Berland and Markel and the continuation of Berland and Markel’s restrictive covenants. “We at PSB are pleased that we were able to resolve this matter,” said a PSB spokesman. “We take the terms of our employment agreements very seriously and expect that all our employees will honor commitments they have made not to compete against us or solicit our clients.”

Mike Berland stated that he regrets what happened and that he valued his long association with PSB. “I am very proud of the achievements of PSB and will do everything that I can to ensure its continued success now and in the future. I have great respect for the work that was done. Over the past 20 years, Mark Penn has been my mentor, colleague and friend. I regret this incident and am happy to move forward.” Markel noted that he now realizes that he had voluntarily given PSB access to the emails which they were entitled to read. Accordingly, he has dismissed his lawsuit against PSB concerning PSB’s review of his emails and he has specifically withdrawn his claim that PSB (and its employees Mark Penn, Jonathan Gardner and Merrill Raman) acted improperly in any way.

For those of you who've been following the ugly break-up of the polling and consulting powerhouse firm of Penn, Schoen & Berland, I've got another piece here from this week's paper focusing on a series of intercepted emails at the center of the million-dollar dispute.

The firm, led by Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn, arranged to intercept the messages from a former employee, Mitchel Markel, as evidence that Markel and, among others, Bloomberg pollster Michael Berland were conspiring to steal corporate clients in violation of clauses in their original contracts. That, in turn, produced a counter-suit from Markel charging that Penn and company had violated federal eavesdropping laws.

I've got a little bit more on how it all happened, and what, precisely, was in those emails that made them so valuable to Penn.

UPDATE: A PSB spokesman just called to voice his disagreement with the situation as an 'ugly breakup.' It was the departure of four employees in a firm of about 200, with business still humming along, he said.

I didn’t mean to imply that the firm had ceased to operate, although it’s worth mentioning that Doug Schoen and Michael Berland – the other named partners in the firm -- have also left, and that Penn is actively trying to ensure that they don’t compete within the industry.  read more »

Last week, I wrote a story about Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's pollster and close political advisor, and his former business associates. As I noted earlier, Penn is suing his former business partner Michael Berland, and several other former employees of their company, Penn, Schoen & Berland, for setting up a rival consulting company, allegedly in violation of a non-compete clause in their contracts. Berland and the other defendants are accused of trying to woo away Penn's corporate clients, but the suit also has political implications, because Berland and another recently departed partner, Doug Schoen, have worked for Michael Bloomberg before, and would presumably be on board for a presidential campaign should the mayor decide to run. That is, if the non-compete clause allows them to.

(More after the jump.)  read more »

Fresh off a tense exchange with Clinton strategist Mark Penn at a forum at Harvard last night, Obama strategist David Axelrod selectively embraced the words of the former President to make the case for his candidate - and against Hillary.

"Bill Clinton famously said that elections are about the future and he's right," Axelrod told me in an interview this morning. "He's absolutely right. And I think Barack Obama represents the future."

--Jason Horowitz

The new web journal, The Democratic Strategist, has an interesting, data-generated take on Hillary Clinton's electibility, the subject of an editorial written this week in the Washington Post by her pollster, Mark Penn, and James Carville.

Their take is basically that her fate lies with the independents, and that she is electable, if not a clear cut favorite in a general election.

"what really matters for the electability question is how independents view her. According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll, 48 percent of indies have a favorable opinion of her, while 46 percent view her unfavorably. (The rest are unsure.) This is remarkably close to John Kerry's 49-48 margin among independents in the 2004 election. So an initial conclusion is that with Clinton heading the Democratic ticket, we will be dealing with another nail-biter in 2008. (Of course, much depends on the Republican ticket.)

On the other hand, Clinton's favorability among Republicans - 26 percent - is significantly larger than Kerry's performance among Republicans (a whopping 6 percent). Presumably she would end up getting substantially less than a quarter of the Republican vote in 2008, but it may be that she can attract enough Republican women to improve on Kerry's performance."

- Jason Horowitz

Back in 1999, Al Gore took a serious beating over the fact that a senior aide, Carter Eskew, had masterminded a tobacco industry campaign to kill a bill, backed by John McCain, aimed at preventing minors from smoking.

Now Hillary Clinton seems headed right into the same storm, and not only because Eskew is a principal in a consulting firm she leans on, the Glover Park Group.

A tighter tie between Clinton and Big Tobacco is her pollster, Mark Penn, who was recently named CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of the leading global public relations companies. Burson-Marsteller also, spokeswoman Elizabeth Vicenzino confirmed today, has as a client the Altria Group.

Altria, you'll recall, was once known as Philip Morris, and thought of as a tobacco company. And their P.R. firm, Burson Marsteller, is the source of a semi-famous memo (.pdf) suggesting switching names "insulates food, beer (and future consumer goods products) from downside of tobacco issues."  read more »

But whatever the name, Altria is still the world's biggest tobacco company. Its smokes are best known under the brand name Marlboro. And the Marlboro Man probably pays even better than Hillary.

Also worth noting: Penn's promotion was announced comfortably after the conclusion of the campaign of one anti-smoking client of his consulting firm: Mike Bloomberg.

No doubt about it, the Hillary Express appears to be running smoothly at last.  read more »