Salon: "Pollster grifter Mark Penn's awful advice for Barack Obama"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Tuesday, Apr 5, 2011 14:30 ET
War Room
Mark Penn has awful advice for Barack Obama
By Alex Pareene



http://www.salon.com/news/2012_elections/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/04/05/mark_penn_advice

Pollster grifter Mark Penn is misleading from the very first sentence of his Huffington Post column on what President Obama must do to win reelection:

Only two Democrats in the last 90 years have been reelected to a second term -- Franklin Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. The rest of the Democrats have seen their presidencies cut short, and so the historical odds of Obama winning a second term are at first glance not encouraging.

What? That is technically factual and completely dishonest. Truman and Johnson -- Democrats -- were both elected to full terms after assuming the presidency. The only recent presidents to lose elections after serving full terms were Carter and Bush and Hoover. The only other president to lose an election instead of resigning or dying was Ford.

Another way to put this is: "Only four incumbent presidents have been defeated in elections in the last 90 years, and three of those presidents were Republicans, so Obama is sitting pretty." Or: "In the last 100 years, a nice round century, nearly all presidents who served a full term and then ran for reelection were reelected."

So Mark Penn is already full of it and we are not even all the way through the first paragraph. Is there even any point in reading on, to learn what losing campaign veteran Penn thinks Obama must do? No, there is not.

[Drale]

1. Just more people who didn't pay attention in high school

The lack of intelligence is really starting to get on my nerves.

[CrossChris]

2. Obama should take advice from the guy whose campaign he crushed in '08

So he can figure out how to get crushed in '12.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[NothingRight]

4. Obama's real challenge to reelection

Penn is doing the same type of partisan mudslinging that they all do. But anyone who really looks at this campaign knows history is not anywhere near the top of the list of concerns for President Obama.

The consistent compromising to conservative ideas, watering down each of the major pieces of legislation over the first two years is the biggest, along with the massive volunteer movement being turned over to the Democratic Party after they won him the election in 2008.

If the President is going to inspire the same type of movement he saw in 2008, it is going to be in spite of what we have seen in the first term.


http://wp.me/p1mIkk-dt

[bemildred]

5. Right, so there will never be a black President by his logic. What a moron.

The past does not compel the future, especially in politics.

[Demeter]

6. Obama Is His Own Biggest Obstacle to Re-election