Big shot Democratic pollster and former Hillary Clinton senior adviser Mark Penn and his wife Nancy Penn Jacobson are hosting a $4,800-per person fundraising reception for Charlie Crist at their Washington home Wednesday. Here's the invite.H/T.
Here I thought the money spent on clown shows was bad. This should really make your blood boil.Nearly $6 million in stimulus money was paid to two firms run by Mark Penn (photo above), Hillary Clinton’s pollster in 2008.Wow. Three whole jobs save for a mere $6 million. How stimulating.
Federal records show that $5.97 million from the $787 billion stimulus helped preserve three jobs at Burson-Marsteller, the global public-relations and communications firm headed by Penn.
Burson-Marsteller won the contract to work on a public-relations campaign to advertise the national switch from analog to digital television. Nearly $2.8 million of the contract was issued to Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, according to federal records.
Senate Republican Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said the three jobs saved at Burson-Marsteller represented a poor value for taxpayers.Well, I'd recommend Congressional hearing on this, but you expect the Democrats to go along with that when their own pollsters are raking in the money?
“It illustrates a very poor way to create jobs,” Kyl said.
Kyl said the appropriateness of Democratic strategists receiving funds “depends on whether they exerted some influence.”
WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton's top campaign strategist advised her to cast presidential rival Barack Obama as having questionable "roots to basic American values and culture" and use the theme to counter the image that his background is diverse and multicultural.Well, it would have been, but the Obamedia had far too much invested in Obama to throw him under the bus.
"I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values," Mark Penn wrote in a March 2007 memo to Clinton.
Clinton did not take Penn's advice, revealed by a report in the September issue of The Atlantic magazine.
The article says Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination went from front-runner status to failure for a number of reasons, from badly managed money to blistering warfare between advisers. Clinton, the candidate who said she was ready to lead on Day One of her administration, did little to quell the infighting.
Clinton grew angry during a conference call with her senior aides about how to recover from her loss in the Iowa caucuses. She found herself doing most of the post-mortem, to near-silence on the other end of the line.
"This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself," Clinton snapped, and hung up, the magazine reported.
Mostly, the disputes were over whether to go negative against Obama, a half-black, Harvard-trained lawyer with a gift for soaring rhetoric and big themes.
Penn advised going negative.
Obama's background — he grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii — was a "lack of American roots," Penn wrote. Also a weakness, he added, was the divisive rhetoric of Obama's controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who cursed America during a sermon.
"Won't a single tape of Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game-ender?" Penn wrote in a March 30 memo.
A top campaign aide to Sen. Hillary Clinton, under fire for meeting with a Colombian diplomat to discuss a free trade deal that the presidential candidate opposes, quit his post on Sunday, the campaign said.
"After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as chief strategist of the Clinton campaign," Clinton's campaign manager Maggie Williams said in a statement.
The left has been obsessing on Blackwater lately, with Henry "Nostrilitus" Waxman holding hearings earlier this week. It's become another convenient way of undermining our mission in Iraq now that we've been making progress. That, and it's a nice diversion from the MoveOn.org-inspired General "Betray Us" fiasco that blew up in their faces a couple of weeks ago.October 6, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - The company run by one of Hillary Clinton's top campaign officials has been providing public-relations services for Blackwater - the security firm, accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians, that has come under fire from Congress.Sure. Just provide all you phone records and emails to investigators and that'll clear everything up.
Burson-Marsteller, run by Clinton pollster Mark Penn, has been representing the troubled security firm in the lead-up to congressional testimony this week in which top company officials defended their policies and techniques for providing security in the war zone.
Penn is one of Clinton's longest-serving and most important advisers, perhaps second only to her husband in influence.
He said yesterday that his company was no longer representing Blackwater.
Listed as the "worldwide CEO" of the company, Penn also said he was not personally involved in the account.
Blackwater became a political lightning rod as the Iraq war spiraled out of control and accusations of torture and abuse spread rampantly.Real cute, Silky. Now why don't you bring up Norman Hsu?
While Blackwater has been heavily criticized by Democrats - including Barack Obama and John Edwards - Clinton has been noticeably silent about the firm's conduct in Iraq.
The Clinton campaign downplayed the association yesterday, saying that Penn never did any work on the Blackwater account and that his company had cut its ties with Blackwater.
"Mark is and remains a valuable member of our team," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said.
He also sought to join the Democratic condemnation of Blackwater.
"Sen. Clinton believes Blackwater must be held accountable for its actions and has laid out a detailed proposal to sharply reduce the number of contractors employed by the federal government by 500,000," Wolfson said.
"She has repeatedly stated her concern that such contractors are not as accountable as federal employees."
Further complicating matters for Clinton is that Blackwater's first contract with the federal government actually wasn't under the Bush administration. It was in 1998, according to company officials, when Clinton's husband was in the White House.
Yesterday's revelations of a tie between Blackwater and Clinton became easy fodder for attacking the Democratic front-runner.
Campaigning in Iowa, former North Carolina Sen. Edwards noted Blackwater's deep ties to Republicans and the Bush administration and described Penn as Clinton's "Karl Rove."
Not sure what's more stunning, some Democrats coming out and admitting the truth or the fact one identified himself. The Clinton smear machine will be coming down on Dave Crooks hard, mark my words. WASHINGTON - Looking past the presidential nomination fight, Democratic leaders quietly fret that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at the top of their 2008 ticket could hurt candidates at the bottom.They have good reason to worry. She's easy to dislike and Republicans voters will overlook any displeasure with the GOP candidate in a heartbeat. Having this obnoxious woman in the White House again does not appeal to the average voter.
They say the former first lady may be too polarizing for much of the country. She could jeopardize the party's standing with independent voters and give Republicans who otherwise might stay home on Election Day a reason to vote, they worry.
In more than 40 interviews, Democratic candidates, consultants and party chairs from every region pointed to internal polls that give Clinton strikingly high unfavorable ratings in places with key congressional and state races.Of course, she has more than her share of Koolaid drinkers, such as Mark Penn.
"I'm not sure it would be fatal in Indiana, but she would be a drag" on many candidates, said Democratic state Rep. Dave Crooks of Washington, Ind.
Unlike Crooks, most Democratic leaders agreed to talk frankly about Clinton's political coattails only if they remained anonymous, fearing reprisals from the New York senator's campaign. They all expressed admiration for Clinton, and some said they would publicly support her fierce fight for the nomination — despite privately held fears.
The chairman of a Midwest state party called Clinton a nightmare for congressional and state legislative candidates.
A Democratic congressman from the West, locked in a close re-election fight, said Clinton is the Democratic candidate most likely to cost him his seat.
A strategist with close ties to leaders in Congress said Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races would be strongly urged to distance themselves from Clinton.
"The argument with Hillary right now in some of these red states is she's so damn unpopular," said Andy Arnold, chairman of the Greenville, S.C., Democratic Party. "I think Hillary is someone who could drive folks on the other side out to vote who otherwise wouldn't."
"Republicans are upset with their candidates," Arnold added, "but she will make up for that by essentially scaring folks to the polls."
"All the negatives on her are out," said Clinton's pollster and strategist Mark Penn. "There is a phenomena with Hillary, because she is the front-runner and because she's been battling Republicans for so long, her unfavorability (rating) looks higher than what they will eventually be after the nomination and through the general election."My advice to Democrats: Please nominate her.
What the Clinton campaign doesn't say is that her edge over potential Republican candidates is much smaller than it should be, given the wide lead the Democratic Party holds over the GOP in generic polling.
The problem is her political baggage: A whopping 49 percent of the public says they have an unfavorable view of Clinton compared to 47 percent who say they hold her in high regard, according to a Gallup Poll survey Aug. 3-5.
Her negative ratings are higher than those of her husband, former President Clinton, former President George H.W. Bush and 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry at the end of their campaigns.
A candidate's unfavorability scores almost always climb during campaigns. If the pattern holds, Clinton has a historically high hurdle to overcome.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief strategist is being accused of illegal eavesdropping in a lawsuit that alleges he and his polling firm monitored the personal e-mails of a former associate who started a rival company.Wow, Democrats accused of sneaky, underhanded tactics.
Mitchell E. Markel, a former vice president at Penn, Schoen & Berland, claims in the lawsuit that the firm began monitoring all messages sent from his personal BlackBerry device nearly a month after he had resigned and become president of his new business. The suit claims that Mark Penn, who is Clinton's chief strategist and pollster, knew about and approved of the monitoring, which the suit says violates federal wiretapping laws.
Penn, Schoen & Berland, which has helped elect clients such as former president Bill Clinton and New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is accused of hacking into Markel's BlackBerry and rigging his e-mail accounts to send copies of his e-mail to another account that the firm had set up. The suit says the BlackBerry that Markel used was always his own, never the property of his former employer.
