Anne Kornblut described heavyweight pollster and PR honcho Mark Penn as Hillary Clinton’s de facto campaign manager in a front-page story in yesterday’s Washington Post. If a presidential candidate is known by the company she keeps, then the relationship between Penn, whose PR firm shills for some of the world’s largest corporations and includes a union-busting department, and Clinton should give pause to potential Clinton voters. And Penn isn’t the only Hillary fan whose agenda may not dovetail with that of progressive Democrats and liberals: when Clinton started shaking the money tree this year, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, a lifelong Republican and Bush Ranger — meaning he raised more than $200,000 for the current president during the 2004 campaign cycle — fell out.
Doug Schoen, Penn’s partner in the polling shop, has a new book out called The Power of the Vote: Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators and Promoting Democracy Around the World. (The reason I know he has a new book out is that I’ve been getting several promotional emails daily during the past two weeks. Stop it.) Presumably the book devotes a chapter or two to Venezuela, since Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates did some mack-daddy polling work down there in 2004, during the referendum on recalling Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and in 2006, during the most recent presidential election there.
Kornblut’s story gives mad props to Penn’s skill as a pollster but also notes that he’s been accused of “skewing his interpretations to portray clients … in the best light.” Perhaps that’s what happened in Venezuela: in 2004, his firm called Chavez as the loser of the referendum, violating Venezuela’s election laws by announcing their exit poll results well before the polls closed. And you could say that their polling was skewed in favor of their client, which turned out to be a US-funded opposition group: Penn, Schoen called the vote (with a margin of error of 1%) as 41% for Chavez, 59% against. The actual vote was the mirror image: Chavez won in a landslide, 59%-41%. Penn’s firm suggested that the vote, which was certified by any number of international observers as free and fair, was in fact fraudulent, sparking protests and riots. But the fraud, such as there was, appears to have occurred on the polling side of the equation.
The firm repeated the exercise in the 2006 elections, saying before the election that Chavez’s oligarchical opponent, Manuel Rosales, was only a few points behind and closing on the eve of the elections. Other polls, including ones by AP and Zogby, showed Chavez with an enormous lead of between 26 and 32 points. The final results? Chavez, 63%-37%, a 26-point win. The firm’s explanation? “[I]t appears that Chávez consolidated the undecided voters.” No allegations of fraud this time around, though.
Whatever one may think of Chavez, the elections that brought him to power and kept him there have been as closely scrutinized as any elections anywhere (we could do with that level of scrutiny here). In the most charitable view, Penn’s firm did some abysmal polling work in 2004, violated the election laws of the host country and then, rather than examining the quality of their own (outsourced) product, cried fraud, contributing to unrest in an already volatile situation. In 2006, they simply blew the polling and ascribed the 20-point error to “undecided voters” — soccer moms, maybe? — rather than, again, examining their own failures. In both instances, the firm’s behavior was at best ethically murky.
Kornblut notes that Penn’s campaign clients in addition to Clinton include Joe Lieberman and Tony Blair, two men who do not lie close to the progressive heart and who share with Clinton a fondness, lingering to various degrees, for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. One senses a pattern, and it suggests that the people Penn finds attractive are not those who embrace sane foreign policies and progressive domestic ones. And there’s the fact that Penn’s route to the Clintons’ hearts ran through toe-sucking degenerate pollster and late-blooming neoconservative Dick Morris, who would probably still be dining at the pre-presidential table had he not been canned for his indiscretions.
Clinton’s association with Penn is troubling enough, but at least he’s nominally on the donkey side of the fray. John Mack, the Bush Ranger, isn’t. It’s unlikely that he spontaneously decided to support Clinton absent any blandishments from her campaign, but even if he did, the reasons will be that 1) he thinks she can win, and 2) he thinks that her governing philosophy won’t be deal-breakingly different than the one for which he raised a boatload of money in 2004. He thinks that a Clinton presidency will work to the benefit of him, his company and his company’s clients. Those interests aren’t entirely exclusive of those embraced by people who aren’t John Mack and his company and clients, but, at the risk of sounding like a shrill, fringe, uncivil populist, there’s probably not a huge overlap. And where there is one, it too is somewhat discomforting.
Health care. Mack says that one of the reasons he’s going with Clinton is that she understands health care and health insurance issues. He’s in good company; in 2006, Clinton was second only to the late (in the electoral sense) Senator Rick Santorum in the race to collect campaign cash from doctors, pharmaceutical firms and the health insurance industry.
Frederick H. Graefe, a health care lawyer and lobbyist in Washington for more than 20 years, said, “People in many industries, including health care, are contributing to Senator Clinton today because they fully expect she will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008.”
“If the usual rules apply,” Mr. Graefe said, early donors will “get a seat at the table when health care and other issues are discussed.”
Tellingly, one of her fund-raisers in the industry is a Republican, William R. Abrams, executive vice president of the Medical Society of the State of New York.
[...]
Of Senator Clinton’s image within the health care industry, Mr. Abrams said, “To the degree skeptics were there, I think she has dispelled any of the skepticism.”
That’s really not what I want to hear from a parasitic industry about a Democratic presidential candidate.
The unfortunate fact is that until we get genuine campaign finance reform, politics will require money, presidential politics will require big money, and anyone who opts in on the big race will wind up taking money from people with whom they don’t necessarily agree and who are applying for that seat at the table just as, well, insurance. But Hillary is not running as a stealth populist — if anything, her backers on the right seem to think she’s running as a stealth Republican — and the financial and health care industries will not be getting the rude shock of their lives if she wins; they’ll be getting more or less what they paid for.
Would Hillary make a better president than Bush? Great Googly Moogly, that’s a stupid question. Will she make a good president? I’ve arrived at the conclusion that at least by my standards, the answer is “not a chance.” If she wins the Democratic nomination and the race is close, I’ll vote for her; otherwise, I want nothing to do with her.
Cuz I don’t like the company she keeps.
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