Mark Penn Steps Down

It's been an interesting day.  While his family seeks to remove a gun from Charlton Heston's cold dead hands Mark Penn is announcing he is leaving Hillary's campaign as chief strategist.  Surely hell has frozen over.  Two monumental events at once.  Penn's conflicts of interest finally got him into so much hot water he could no longer continue.  When you work on such a high level campaign as Hillary Clinton's you'd better sever all other affiliations.  Penn didn't and met with representatives of the Columbian government last Monday.

Hillary opposes the free trade deal Columbia desires and hired Mark Penn to lobby for for them.  As I said last week when this news broke, these are the inherent risks involved with hiring lobbyists to run your campaign.  I'm sure more of these issues will explode in John McCain's face before November since his entire top campaign staff are lobbyists.  Charlie Black just left Penn's lobbying firm so as to reduce the belief among conservatives that he actually answered to Mark Penn.

Penn wasn't one of my favorite people long before this.  While getting paid by the Clinton campaign he was double dipping by also getting paid as a media consultant:  receiving a 15% commission on all media buys by the campaign.  Wonder why you see few Hillary ads online?  Penn doesn't get paid for those, only TV and radio.  It wasn't in his personal interests to advertise online.  These are serious conflicts of interest and something I wrote about a while back.

Now that he's gone I expect much better things from the Clinton campaign.  With Heston gone too there's much less risk now of backfires.

Comments

[Kevin]

This is something we can all agree on. I hope Penn isn't hired by a Democrat ever again.

[peter]

How about Ickes, Kevin? Do you want this slime to get hired by any Dem? How about Maggie Williams? Or Wolfson? Or Clintons? The list is too long.

[Peter Bonny, Jr.]

I'm glad Penn's gone and we can wash our hands and be done with it. Hillary isn't going to come out looking good with all of this bad coverage in the light of the Pennsylvania primary. She's going to look as ugly as Arnold Swartzenegger in a face-smashing contest.