I think we should all be able to agree now that Mark Penn should never work in Democratic politics again:
Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The Atlantic.I mean, the fact that Mark Penn managed to lose an un-losable campaign should have been the first clue; the fact that he was pushing for Clinton to start spreading the same bogus attacks that have been the bread and butter of the lowest scoundrels of the FOXNews-Rushbo set. Kudos to Hillary Clinton for not resorting to those tactics. And shame on Mark Penn for thinking that was the kind of campaign a Democrat should run.
The magazine reports Penn suggested getting much rougher with Obama in a memo on March 30, after her crucial wins in Texas and Ohio: “Does anyone believe that it is possible to win the nomination without, over these next two months, raising all these issues on him? ... Won’t a single tape of [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright going off on America with Obama sitting there be a game ender?” [. . .]
Penn, the presidential campaign’s chief strategist, wrote in a memo to Clinton excerpted in the article: “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”