I've got your scapegoat candidate right here

Time and time again as I was bothered by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and struggled to articulate why, it all seemed to come back to her pollster and strategist, Mark Penn. It was Penn who first made the comment that I found so ridiculous that they had polling indicating a quarter of Republican women would cross over to vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. Then, Penn was the one who claimed they had polling showing a backlash among female voters to what Clinton described as her being "ganged up on six on one" in the debate where she flubbed the question on driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Penn was also the smarmy asshole who repeated the mention of Obama's admitted cocaine use just a second after he disclaimed Billy Shaheen's remarks about the same topic.

I'd already privately started to wonder if a huge part of the problem I had with the Clinton campaign was actually with Mark Penn's boneheaded strategic advice to the candidate, which much like a male author trying to write in the voice of a female character, just lacked any authenticity or understanding of what makes women like me buy what a candidate's selling. Penn claimed to have polling data to back up all of his wrongheaded assertions, but I questioned how polling could depart so hard from what I know to be true of the women I talk to about the election every day, nearly all of whom belied Penn's alleged samples.

Well, in the aftermath of Iowa and the anticipated campaign shakeup after losing New Hampshire (if she does lose--you never know with these things), people are starting to ask questions about Mark Penn. It really started in earnest when he issued a memo yesterday claiming that unlike Kerry in 2004, Obama hadn't benefited from an "Iowa bounce." Penn cited polling issued to that point, most of which only contained a partial or incomplete sample of post-Iowa voter preference, and which showed only a tie at best and not the kind of double digit rise that Kerry enjoyed. Of course, just a few hours after he sent out this boneheaded memo, the polling began to roll in showing a double digit bounce on all fronts for Obama. Boy, did Penn look stupid. And desperate.

And now today, as the press moves from "she might actually lose" to "shakeup imminent" mode (ignoring Drudge who skipped straight ahead to the "might she actually drop out of the race" hopefest), while the pundits look for someone to blame, Penn is getting fire from all comers. Suddenly there is talk that he's a charlatan, brought into the Clintons' lives by Dick Morris and the Clintons are too loyal to him to see that he's killing her campaign with his dumb ideas. And it couldn't happen to a better person. Even though I support another candidate, and even though it can only help her improve, I hope Hillary Clinton is smart enough to fire Mark Penn and rid herself of the idiotic poll-driven cancer that is driving her doom. Hillary Clinton needs to right the ship fast, and throwing the fat sleazeball Penn overboard is a great way to start that effort.