Mark Penn's Big Stimulus Payday

Mark Penn is a pollster who thought that made him a senior political strategist. The results were predictably hilarious, as anyone who followed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign knows. To get a full measure of just how bad it was, one has to study the general election campaign of Thomas Dewey in 1948. Even that's an imperfect analogy, since Dewey actually managed to win his party's presidential nomination.

The '48 presidential race wasn't supposed to be much of a contest. President Truman's Democratic base was split three ways between himself, Progressive candidate Henry Wallace, and the Dixiecrat segregationist asshole Strom Thurmond. Governor Dewey was so far ahead that the media stopped polling altogether in early October and the president of the United States had to beg for money just to keep his campaign train rolling.

However, you will hear no tales of the grand accomplishments of the Dewey Administration from those Americans who even bother studying history anymore.

Why is that, you ask? Well, Dewey presented himself as being so inevitable that he seemed to resent that there was an election at all. He was so busy in the closing weeks of the campaign planning his administration that he almost completely stopped campaigning.

That was, in a nutshell, the grand strategy of Hillary '08. If there was a slogan reflective of her candidacy, it was "Can we get this over by February 5th? I've got shit to do." That "strategy," for lack of a better word, was the brainchild of Mark Penn, and it was doomed from the beginning. In fact, it was only in the middle of losing what would be 11 contests in a row that Penn realized that there might be a problem.

The Democratic primaries don't work like their GOP counterparts, where the frontrunner is usually preserved enough to survive a general election campaign. The whole point of the Democratic primaries is to actually kill the frontrunner. That's why people like Ed Muskie, Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart, and Paul Tsongas were never their party's nominees.

Worse still, Clinton and Penn stuck to the hope that Obama would just go away if they ignored him hard enough, and they stuck to it long after it was too late. If I were to describe Mark Penn, it would be as 250 pounds of incomprehensible incompetence stuffed into an off-the-rack suit.

All things being equal, I'm surprised that Obama '08 wasn't paying Penn during the primaries. He, more than anyone else alive, is responsible for the presidency of Barack Obama.

That's why you have to almost admire the ability of the White House to make up for lost time.

A contract worth nearly $6 million in stimulus funds was awarded by the Obama adminstration to two firms run by Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's pollster in 2008.

Federal records show that a contract worth $5.97 million, part of the $787 billion stimulus Congress passed this year, 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 awarded through a subcontract to Penn's polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland, according to federal records.

Burson-Marsteller couldn't have been in enough trouble to warrant federal stimulus money, since there's still more than enough swine in the world for it to spin for. Burson's client list represents nothing as much as it does deep pockets and a profound lack of public morality.

On the other hand, Dana Perino currently works for Burson, and since I would desperately like to "stimulate" her, maybe that $6 million is money well spent. Who can say for sure?

If nothing else, my fiscal conservatism doesn't extend below my belt, which explains why I'm such a fun date.