Tag: Penn

Mark J. Penn, one of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s key and most controversial advisers, is no longer her chief political strategist.

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In the end, it was Penn’s day job that did him in.

Penn is the chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, a Washington public relations firm that had been hired to help the country of Colombia gain a bilateral trade agreement with the United States.

Any suggestion that Clinton supports the trade agreement could hurt her in Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary. Voters there connect foreign trade with the loss of jobs in their state and in the country.

Penn had said that other members of the firm were doing the work with Colombia. But according to The New York Times, Clinton was angered when she learned that Penn had met with officials from Colombia last week and she insisted on his demotion.

“After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as chief strategist of the Clinton campaign,” Maggie Williams, the campaign manager, said in a statement Sunday evening.

Penn’s company also has ties with Blackwater Worldwide, the military contractor and Countrywide Financial, one of the leading issuer of subprime mortgages. According to the Times, Penn had also refused to stop dealing with those companies while helping Clinton.

Penn did call his meeting with the Colombia officials an “error in judgment.” After that statement, the government of Colombia severed its ties with Burson-Marsteller.

Clinton has been under pressure to do something about Penn for months. He is known to have an abrasive style that has irritated other staffers. And, especially when Clinton was losing in primaries, he was criticized for giving her bad advice.

“No matter how much bad stuff happened, (Clinton) kept to her Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn,” Frank Rich wrote in the Times earlier in the year.

Drawn to Bill Clinton’s team by Dick Morris, Penn helped fashion President Clinton’s 1996 re-election. Penn was also a leader in Hillary Clinton’s successful senatorial campaign in 2000.

And he guided Britain’s Tony Blair to his a third re-election as prime minister, just as he put Israel’s Menachem Begin in the win column.

Penn is the co-author of Microtrends: The Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes.

In Microtrends, Penn and co-author E. Kinney Zalesne divide the American public into emerging demographic categories. (Stay-at-home workers, etc.)

“There is no One America any more, or Two or Three or Eight,” Penn writes. “In fact, there are hundreds of Americas, hundreds of new niches made up of people drawn together by common interests.”

Penn is the nominal boss of Charles R. Black Jr., a key McCain adviser and spokesman.

Black is the chairman of BKSH & Associates, a lobbying firm that is a subsidiary of Burson-Marsteller.

The Times reports that Penn’s polling firm, Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, will continue to poll for Clinton.

• Clinton’s Mark Penn still favors micro over macro – February 26, 2008
• Geoffrey Garin fills Penn’s post in Clinton campaign – April 8, 2008
• Mark Penn distances himself from Blackwater – October 6, 2007
• Williams takes Solis Doyle’s job with Clinton campaign – February 11, 2008
• Patti Solis Doyle regroups for NH primary – January 4, 2008
• Benazir Bhutto’s American support network – December 31, 2007
• Lobbyist Black defends McCain on lobbyist issue – February 24, 2008
• NH brings job security to the Clinton camp – January 9, 2008
• Blackwater’s Cofer Black stays in the shadows – October 17, 2007
• Yucaipa may pay Bill Clinton $20M – January 24, 2008