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| Home Front: Politix |
| Mark Penn's Transgression |
| 2008-04-09 |
| By George F. Will Hillary Clinton's campaign, which is a guttering candle, has suffered a perhaps extinguishing gust of ill wind. Her principal strategist has been forced to resign from that role. Mark Penn's sin was to be caught doing something sensible, surreptitiously. That is the only way Democrats can do sensible things regarding trade when their party is pandering to organized labor. Penn's downfall makes him a member of a species that many Democrats insist is large and about which Democrats theatrically grieve: Penn is a casualty of free trade. He was freely practicing one of his trades, which is advising clients on how to deal with the U.S. government. To that end, he met with the Colombian ambassador to the United States concerning how to win ratification of the U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement. Although he simultaneously was freely practicing another of his trades, being a campaign operative, he probably perished for commercial reasons rather than political principles. Colombia hired him through the corporation for which he works, Burson-Marsteller. Unfortunately, his other client, Clinton, currently opposes the free-trade agreement as ardently as, presumably, she opposes the Red Sox -- for now. Penn's actual beliefs about free trade, whatever they are, pro or con, certainly accord either with those that Clinton holds now or with those that she held back in the 1990s, when she was in the White House's East Wing acquiring the semi-demi-quasi-presidential experience that makes her just the person to answer the red telephone that, judging by her campaign ads, rings constantly in the West Wing. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #5 "the behavior of petulant, peevish, vindictive person looking for someone to blame for shortcomings" And this is different from the regular Hildebeest how, exactly? |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2008-04-09 22:46 |
| #4 Hillary has thrown a lot of her staff overboard and under the bus. Hillary, that is not a strategy but the behavior of petulant, peevish, vindictive person looking for someone to blame for shortcomings. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2008-04-09 16:14 |
| #3 Ahhhh but Woodrow, you miss the key phrase there. "...private-sector workforce." The Dems are totally in hoc to the PUBLIC sector unions and, as counter intuative as it may be, are required to pander to the Union Label no matter what!! |
| Posted by: AlanC 2008-04-09 11:01 |
| #2 Amazingly, that obeisance is enforced by unions that represent a tiny (7.5 percent) and declining fraction of the private-sector workforce. That is an interesting factoid. They are just a tiny little yappy dog that makes the big dogs run scared. |
| Posted by: Woodrow Slusorong7967 2008-04-09 06:13 |
| #1 This is a winning issue for Republicans with a majority of Americans - particularly the better informed ones. Union membership has been declining in America for decades but it remains a potent atavistic bloc in Democratic politics. It will prove very easy for Sen. McCain to argue that protectionism harms broader American interests, especially since the domestic economy is faltering but with U.S. exports at an all time high. |
| Posted by: Gliling Lumplump3518 2008-04-09 05:14 |