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Even before his ill-fated sit-down with the Colombians, Penn's work at Burson (which services such controversial clientele as defense contractors, drug companies, Big Oil, and Big Tobacco) frequently served as a lightning rod for bad press and attacks from the Democratic base. And as Hillary's primary fortunes faltered, Penn's storied message savvy also came under fire, with the baying for his head growing ever louder inside the campaign and from outside donors. For months, the joke around Washington was that, in all of the Clinton campaign, Penn had exactly two allies: Bill and Hillary. Now, as his public spanking is greeted with hardcore, widespread schadenfreude, the only question being asked about his fall from the Clintons' grace seems to be, "What took them so long?" The explanations offered by a variety of Hillarylanders, erstwhile Penn colleagues, and party veterans speak as much to the predilections and peculiarities of Bill and Hillary as to any particular talents Penn himself possesses.
Ask any member of Team Hillary what has bound Penn to the Clintons, and you'll receive a mini-history lesson on the myriad trials he has seen them through, starting with Bill's 1996 reelection. In the wake of the disastrous 1994 midterms, Penn and then-partner Doug Schoen were quietly brought into the White House by Dick Morris to help with some course correction in advance of the race. As one former Clintonite and Penn defender explains it, the president, having been pulled too far toward the big-government, lefty populism of some early advisers, was searching for a way back to the center, and the right-leaning Penn helped Clinton telegraph centrist values to the public and sell voters on policy ideas both large (welfare reform, balanced budgets) and small (school uniforms). When Morris was forced from the campaign over revelations he had been spending his nights at Washington's Jefferson Hotel sucking the toes of a call girl--news of which broke inopportunely at the Dems' nominating convention--Penn slid into the role of Invaluable Advisor. At campaign's end, he received the lion's share of credit for making Clinton the first Democratic president to win a second term since FDR.
Then came Monica. Clinton needed his pollster to float possible damage-control strategies without everyone else around the White House knowing (and leaking) what was going on; for Penn to do this, the president had to entrust him with some of the juicier details of his predicament in order to prepare for the worst. "So you're starting from a point of confidentiality that nobody else has," notes a Penn colleague from that time. As impeachment loomed, Penn counseled Clinton to stay focused on reassuring Americans that he was still hard at work for them, partisan distractions be damned. When at last Clinton emerged from the firestorm singed but alive, Penn once more enjoyed the credit. By then, he had proved himself not only strategically savvy, but also loyal and discreet--two attributes absolutely necessary for access into Hillary's inner-circle in particular.
And so the relationship grew. When Hillary decided to run for Senate, Bill urged her to go with Penn. When the Clintons suffered a string of PR disasters in Bill's first few months out of office--the Marc Rich pardon, the furnishings allegedly removed from the White House, the cash-for-pardons scheme by Hillary's brother Hugh--Penn served as a source of stability as he spearheaded the effort to repair their images. By this time, says one long-time Clinton insider, "he was like a crutch."
Penn's defenders say it's no mystery why the Clintons have stuck with him through the years: He's loyal, he's brilliant, and, most importantly, they've never lost with him. He also compliments many of their political and strategic biases. Hillary's recent populism notwithstanding, people note that Penn's centrist politics jibe with the Clintons' positioning of themselves as New (and improved) Democrats. "They are moderates," says a pro-Penn ex-Clintonite. "They believe in trying to accomplish things through active, centrist means." Moreover, say defenders, since Penn isn't tied to the party's traditional interest groups (most notably labor unions), he offers a fresher, less-dogmatic perspective than other party pollsters. (Certainly, Penn, Schoen & Berland, part of the Burson family since 2001, isn't a dogmatically Democratic firm; between 2004 and 2006, it received hundreds of thousands in consulting fees from the New York State Senate Republican Campaign Committee.) Penn also shares Hillary's conviction that campaigns should focus on policy rather than personality, and, in keeping with her penchant for detailed policy talk, Penn believes races are won more by targeting small demographic movements ("microtrends," as he has dubbed them) than by tapping some sweeping cultural zeitgeist. Like both Clintons, he is a fierce political fighter for whom the concept of surrender is anathema.
In fact, many of the criticisms commonly lobbed at Penn--he's too conservative, too corporate, too cautious, too arrogant, too opinionated, too confrontational--are among the very qualities prized by the Clintons (and other politicos). For instance, Penn's pro-corporate sympathies are a sore spot for many Hillarylanders, and his resistance to bowing out of his duties at Burson caused grumbling inside the campaign and out. (Even as Penn publicly claimed to have recused himself from all Burson work save for Microsoft, he would, say colleagues, not infrequently be phoning in to campaign strategy calls from some distant locale where he was tending to his firm's business.) But Penn's phenomenal corporate success also contributes to his "aura" of being a winner, say party operatives. "Making a lot of money and having the ear of a lot of powerful people creates sort of a mutual circle of self-validation," explains one colleague from a past campaign. "The fact that Bill Gates listens to him, Wow, that means he must be smart."
And while some of Burson's clients have prompted questions about Penn's (and by extension Hillary's) values, insiders say the Clintons saw Penn's breadth of experience as potentially valuable in the general election, both in terms of overall perspective and specific knowledge. If Penn's looking at a poll for Microsoft and gets an impression of how the public thinks about something, explains an unaffiliated party operative, he can apply that knowledge elsewhere: "The boundaries between clients aren't hard and fast."
Others in the party object to, if not Penn's disdain for liberals, then his chronic inability to hide that disdain. "One of his favorite things is the 'double-push off,'" chuckles the colleague from a past race. "On the one hand, he's attacking Bush and pushing off of him. On the other hand, he's attacking and pushing off the excesses of the left." And while this tendency risks alienating many within the party's base, Penn's rough handling of liberals rarely upset the Clintons too severely, considering Bill's historical success with triangulation.
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Link:
http://www.tnr.com/environmentenergy/story.html?id=2e8c710e-8b44-48ac-aa57-ef641637f07cSpeaks volumes...
:shrug:
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