Mark Penn and the Epic Fail

Nothing illustrates the folly of all the Clinton Campaign post-mortem's more than Mark Penn's The Problem Wasn't The Message — It Was The Money.

It's not that Penn is wrong*, it's that he's not even bothering to try and answer the question. Penn has two conflicting interests here: the interest he has in being taken seriously as a political commenter, and the interest he has in getting paid for message-crafting in future campaigns. But the degree to which he is taken seriously in the future is almost completely dependent on whether or not he works for campaigns in the future, and not at all on whether or not he gives a good answer to this question. So Mark Penn has zero incentive to inform the public here, and every incentive to shift blame away from himself (as most of the commentariat currently places the lion's share of the blame for Clinton's campaign on him).

Similarly, Christie Whitman has zero incentive to accurately assess the level of sexism Clinton faced, but every incentive to complain about the difficulties for female politicians, which, as I point out, does female Republican politicians a lot more good than Democrats. Whitman, of course, is a female Republican politician.

*For an analysis of the substance of Penn's piece, lookie here.