Mark Penn Resigns, Too Bad It Came About 6 Months Too Late…

In a statement from Clinton’s Campaign Manager, Mark Penn’s resignation became public.  It’s worth noting though that although Penn will no longer be Chief Strategist, his firm will still be polling for the Clinton Campaign, so it is not a complete break from Penn (as I think the most of the coverage I’ve seen/read so far seems to suggest).

Penn’s resignation was the result of a meeting he recently had with the Colombian Ambassador to discuss strategy for the passage of a trade deal that is opposed by Hillary Clinton.  Penn was the target of criticism the past few days, but it’s worth mentioning (for the comedic factor) that it was Ed Rendell that ultimately put the nail in his coffin this morning on Meet The Press, saying:

RUSSERT:Governor Rendell, should the Clinton campaign fire Mark Penn?

GOV. RENDELL:  Well, there are a lot of issues in which you can raise that question, Tim.  Yeah, I think you’ve got to make it very clear when you’re someone who’s a consultant who you’re representing and who you’re not representing.  And I would hope that Mr. Penn, when he talked to the Colombians, made that clear.  It doesn’t sound that he–like he did, and that’s something the campaign should take into question.

Taking a trip down memory lane, it becomes pretty clear why Penn’s resignation is coming at a point far too late in the campaign to have any benefit to Clinton’s campaign (outside of deflecting the immediate criticism should he have stayed).  Penn is largely responsible for:

• Clinton’s inevitability strategy
• The Clinton Campaign’s decision not to compete strongly in caucuses
• The infamous and heavily mocked 3AM ad
• Botching the Obama drug use dust up preceeding the New Hampshire primary
• And a host of other bizarre statements and terrible strategic decisions that heavily contributed to Clinton’s weakened political position 

I close with a post from Yglesias that demonstrates the laughable and willfully ignorant responses Penn is capable of (with a possibility of JW putting together a Mark Penn’s greatest hits post tomorrow):

I’ve been known to engage in some Mark Penn-bashing in my day, but this passage from Microtrends is easily worth the price of admission:

My friend and colleague Sergio Bendixen, president of Bendixen and Associates in Miami and a preeminent expert in Hispanic public opinion research, conducted a cell phone poll of 600 Californians, aged 16-22, and asked them (innocuously enough), “what do you think you will most likely be doing in ten years?” It was a open-ended question, meaning that the respondents could give any answer they wanted (rather than being guided by a list of possible answers). As expected, almost 70 percent of the young folks said they’d be working, some in a specific career or running their own businesses. Twelve percent said they’d be in college, and 12percent said they’d be raising a family. One percent said they’d be in the military. And then, like a bolt from the blue, another 1 percent of California’s young respondents volunteered that, in ten years, they would most likely be snipers.

Now, fascinatingly, rather than presenting any additional research or taking the opportunity to inform people about the possibility of polling error, Penn just launches into several pages worth of explaining the causes of the rise of this “new ambition of the younger generation.”