The real case against Mark Penn

Posted by Guest Blogger at 8:42 AM on May 10, 2007.

This guest post from Mark Schmitt originally appeared on TPM Cafe.

I predicted a few weeks ago that we would start to see more stories about the bizarrely conflicting roles of one Mark Penn, who holds down the job of "Worldwide President and CEO" of the fifth-largest public relations firm in the universe (Burson-Marsteller) while also apparently being the de facto campaign manager for Senator Clinton's presidential bid.

Ari Berman of the Nation has now opened the bidding with a superb article revealing much of what it actually means to be Worldwide President and CEO of Burson-Marsteller, including presiding over more than one Republican lobbying operation and a union-busting outfit that was once prominently featured on the Burson-Marsteller website but was quickly given the "Commissar Vanishes" treatment after I mentioned it in passing. I wasn't actually that interested in Penn's conflicts of interest as in the nature of his advice and his polling, and its influence on American politics. (I'm told that Berman will have more about Penn-as-pollster in the print edition of the Nation.)

Kevin Drum asks a good youngest-child-question: "Can someone explain to me the cult of the pollster in big-league politics?....Surely any politician with an IQ in three digits is pretty well aware of what people think and how they vote." Indeed, at some point, probably dating to Patrick Caddell's role in the Carter campaign, the superstar pollster joined the media buyer in the small subset of campaign workers who live in Georgetown townhouses and Virginia horse farms.

But I'm not as skeptical as Kevin of the role of pollsters, which is why my argument is specific to Penn, and why I'll use this opportunity to say a little more about it. It's hard to imagine a political campaign without a good pollster in the room. It's easy to get basic data on what people think, but, for example, if I were a candidate pushing health care, I would want to know everything there is to know about public attitudes on health care and policy, and who trusted messengers are and what language works, and what constituencies I'm reaching, and all that. Good pollsters provide that context, and if they're very good, they also help you understand which views are deeply held and which can be vulnerable to persuasion.

There is another kind of polling that can be useful to campaigns and which appears to be Penn's specialty, which tries to understand the population by breaking it down into different groups based on demographics and values. This can be hugely revealing and extremely valuable. The Pew Research Center's periodic studies of "Political Typology" are a premiere example of this work, creating categories such as "Upbeats" and "Pro-Government Conservatives" that generally share attitudes on policy and have much in common demographically. Such an analysis is highly complex, as you essentially put all the data together and try to find natural "clusters" of demographics and values that emerge, trying not to impose categories on the data. You can't do it without a fairly large sample size (2,000 in the Pew poll) and a long questionnaire. Pollster Stan Greenberg did a similar analysis, explained most fully in his book, The Two Americas, in which he created such memorable categories as "F-You Boys" -- poorly educated white men under 50, a key part of the Bush base. If these categories are real and robust, it can help a political strategist figure out how to construct a majority -- for example, if you know you're going to capture very few of the "F-You Boys," then what do you need from other categories?

When Penn markets categories such as "soccer moms" and "office park dads," he seems to be doing the same kind of analysis. But it's hard to know, because unlike almost any other Democratic pollster, he never shows his work.

Indeed, my first criticism of Penn was here in TPM Cafe last July, responding to an op-ed he co-wrote with James Carville making broad assertions such as that "Democratic and even independent women are thrilled with the idea" of Senator Clinton running for president, all without a single piece of data to support them. It is telling to compare the web sites of Penn, Schoen and Berland and that of Greenberg's firm, Greenberg, Quinlan & Rosner: Both firms do plenty of work that is proprietary,  and both have corporate clients. But Greenberg's site is full of actual data -- the link above goes to a page with 192 reports on U.S. politics, eleven since the beginning of this year alone! Penn's site has nothing; a link to
"read samples of our thinking" goes to a page with links to those same data-free op-eds!  In short, we have no way of knowing whether Penn's demographic analysis of the electorate is as rigorous as Pew's or Greenberg's or whether he, if you'll forgive me some technical jargon, pulls it out of his ass. (see update below)


Penn also makes a particular use of his political typology, which is to declare that a certain voter category of his own devising is "the key" to the election because it could go either way: soccer moms, office park dads, wired workers, etc., or in his corporate work, "Mom-fluentials."  Even if the category is firmly defined, and even if it is a "swing" category, that form of analysis rests on two other assumptions: That almost all other demographic categories are not swingable, and that the electorate cannot be expanded -- that is, that non-voters cannot be made voters. But neither assumption is justified: As I argued last fall, Karl Rove showed that the Republican base could be expanded, and so can the Democratic base, and in 2006, virtually every demographic category increased its Democratic vote significantly. To define a particular group as key is to deny those other possibilities, and in doing so, leads to a particular narrowing brand of politics focused exclusively on the concerns of the group defined as "key," which in Penn's case is reliably the upper half of the middle class.

In fact, when elections are as tight as they have been recently, any group can be defined as "key." It doesn't have to be a 50/50 swing vote group. In fact, in 2002, when Penn argued that "office-park dads" (white suburban men 25-64) are "the key swing voter that the party needs in order to win the next election," he was actually highlighting a reliably Republican group, acknowledging that, "Democrats don't need to win office park dads outright...We just need to fight for our share." Sure, but using that kind of logic, any group can be declared the "key swing voter": white evangelicals,  atheists, F-You Boys, unmarried women, union members or non-union members, etc. A group voting 10% Democratic could go to 20%; a group voting 80% Democratic could go to 90. The choice is entirely arbitrary.

And that fact proves Ari Berman's conclusion that Penn's choice of categories has little to do with the actual data and everything to do with his presumptions going in -- populism doesn't work, don't criticize corporations -- which in turn have a delightfully precise correspondence with the interests of the clients of the firm of which Penn is Worldwide President and CEO.  And that's why neither Senator Clinton, the people with good sense in her campaign, labor leaders or other Democrats should accept lobbyist Howard Paster's explanation to Berman that Penn's corporate and anti-union clientele is "part of a whole 'nother life we lead."


Fortunately, Ezra Klein is calling those people and asking why they accept that claim.

Tagged as: election08, hillary clinton, mark penn