Clinton pollster/strategist Mark Penn spent a good part of Thursday morning telling two dozen grizzled D.C reporters he doesn’t think Hillary has the primary in the bag.
But the subtext of his later remarks cut against that grain, in an implicit, we're-taking-nothing-for-granted kind of way. Penn, it turns out, is not only looking past the primary -- he's rather picky about the type of general election victory he’d like to see Hillary win.
It may seem nuts for a guy who’s candidate is crazy-glued to the word "polarizing," but Penn says Clinton desperately needs to create a grand "governing coalition" if the White House prize is actually worth obtaining. If not, she’ll wind up mired in partisan mud-wrestling like George W. Bush (or her husband, though Penn didn’t say that).
No more of this Blue States-plus-Ohio stuff for Penn, who thinks Clinton’s appeal for women could bring a half dozen states in the upper south and west into play for the Dems.
"Getting elected is only part of being president," he said.
Glenn Thrush
When a reporter asked him if he was "Hillary Clinton’s Karl Rove," the cherubic, cheerful, Diet-Coke swilling marketing impresario shot back: "I’m Hillary Clinton’s Mark Penn" and went on to pick apart Rove’s ’04 "wedge issue" strategy. (It, if you recall, consisted of whipping up the faithful on gay marriage and scaring independents into believing that John Kerry planned to hug Osama on the South Lawn.)
"The coalition that the president (put together in ’04) was no effective coalition for governing… It turned out that kind of strategy was a very bad for governing."
That made Bush’s victory in ’04 "very counterproductive," he added.
Penn's own strategy – "Swing is King" – goes something like this:
1) Convince skeptical swing voters that Hillary is a charming well-informed person who doesn’t eat people like them for breakfast.
2) Create broad consensus on pocketbook issues by adopting moderate, flexible and palatable (poll-tested?) positions on health care, immigration, etc.
3) Win back hawkish female voters in the South and Midwest (a.k.a "security moms") by taking the toughest possible foreign policy positions – except on Iraq, which much of the country has turned against.
4) Paint Rudy & Co. as a bunch of angry white guys (Penn, famous for reducing demographic subgroups to two-word epithets calls them "macho men") more interested in attacking her than solving the country’s problems.
"I don’t think the Republicans have any real outstanding stars in terms of their candidates and I don’t think the Republicans even think that they have that," he added.