A number of diaries over the weekend wondered aloud about Senator Clinton and why she is so tremendously disliked. For some of us, the reasons are several, and giving the answers is growing tiresome since the ones asking the question have their mind set on the Junior Senator, without regard to anything one might say as an answer.
The Washington Post (8/15, A3, Baker, 723K) notes Rove "says he will not join any 2008 presidential campaign. That's just as well because none of the Republican candidates presumably could afford the association even if they wanted his strategic smarts. Besides, none of them is running the campaign quite the way he would. The candidate who seems to be adopting his style and methods the most so far? Hillary Rodham Clinton." Clinton's campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle has "effectively vowed to run her operation much as Rove did his two successful national campaigns." The Clintons "recognize the skill Rove has brought to politics and admire his craft, if not his ideology. Just days after the November 2004 election, Bill Clinton pulled Rove aside at the dedication of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Arkansas. 'Hey, you did a marvelous job, it was just marvelous what you did,' Clinton told Rove, according to the book 'The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008,' by John F. Harris and Mark Halperin. 'I want to get you down to the library. I want to talk politics with you. You just did an incredible job, and I'd like to really get together with you and I think we could have a great conversation.'" The Post ends its story posting a question, "So, would a Clinton victory next year be a repudiation of Karl Rove politics or the perpetuation of them?"
Source: The Front Runner, 8.15.07
In her book "Living History," Hillary Clinton called him "brilliant and intense."
In her first Senate race in 2000, the way she deployed Penn struck observers as unusual. He not only analyzed poll data, he crafted campaign messages - duties ordinarily split between different individuals.
Today Penn has a different - but also conspicuous - dual role. While acting as the former first lady's marketing guru, he's kept his post as chief executive officer of the giant corporate public relations firm Burson-Marsteller. This company has been known to help keep labor unions at bay for employers. The firm also represents Royal Dutch Shell, and the tobacco titan Phillip Morris, to name a couple.
Newsday 9.21.07
Mr Penn's centrism is partly a matter of personal sympathies. His strongest ties are to conservative Democrats. He cut his teeth working for Ed Koch in New York. He worked closely with the Democratic Leadership Council, and more generally with the so-called "national security" Democrats. He has a long record as a friend of Israel and as an advocate of regime change in Iraq. He helped to run Joe Lieberman's campaign in 2004.
It is also a matter of self-interest. Mr Penn is the very embodiment of the Washington-business nexus. The WPP Group, a public-relations giant, turned him into a multimillionaire when it bought his consulting firm in 2001. It then made him chief executive of one of its subdivisions, Burson-Marsteller, in 2005. Burson-Marsteller is a global behemoth with 100 offices in 59 countries, annual revenues of around $300m, and some of the world's biggest companies among its clients.
...
This all sounds like a formula for success: a brilliant pollster who will steer his candidate to the centre but who will not try to turn an election victory into a White House empire. Perhaps it will be. But Mr Penn may have a weakness of his own—his umbilical ties to business interests and his visceral distaste for anything that smells of populism. The left already regards him as exemplifying everything that is wrong with the Democratic establishment. Continued economic problems may intensify resentment of the Beltway fat cats. Mr Rove eventually fell because he tried to change American politics too much. Mr Penn's biggest problem—and perhaps Mrs Clinton's too—is that he wants to change too little.
The Economist, 8.25.07
Do not give up your vote in the primaries! this election is too important to go backwards...