You gotta be kidding me! Mark Penn has decided that the perfect partner to revive his tarnished reputation as a PR genius will be—-Karen Hughes. This is two drunks leaning on eachother and thinking they are steady.
Some doubts are rising in the minds of supposedly committed Clinton super-delegates. As Joe Trippi pointed out last week, “its hard to be the 800 pound gorilla when you’re broke”. The new pitch to panicked Clinton supporters is much like the Guiliani pitch of last month.
The Clinton team moved on Monday to shift the spotlight off the candidate’s short-term challenges and focus instead on “the long run,” in the words of her senior strategist, Mark Penn.
“She has consistently shown an electoral resiliency in difficult situations that have made her a winner,” Mr. Penn said. “Senator Obama has in fact never had a serious Republican challenger.”
Excuse me, but when has Senator Clinton ever “had a serious Republican challenger”?
UPDATE: Josh Marshall says even Rudy’s campaign manager thinks Clinton is running a Rudy Strategy
I said a few weeks ago that I thought it would be impossible for Hillary to tear up on cue a second time. It would just seem too phony. I was wrong. The clip shows some supporter reading from Mark Penn talking points script and then on cue, Hillary gets misty-eyed. Mark Penn must be worried about tomorrow.
The ability to escalate female backlash in Hillary’s favor in the last two days of the New Hampshire campaign is pretty startling. The incident that kicked it off was two guys carrying a large sign saying “Iron My Shirt”(hard to sneak in to a closed campaign appearance). The New York Daily News smells another Mark Penn plant:
Clinton asked that the lights be turned on, apparently to see them better and declared. “Oh the remnants of sexism, alive and well tonight,” to applause.
She then talked about breaking glass ceilings, before joking as the pair were hustled out: “If there’s anybody in the audience who wants to learn to iron his own shirt, we can talk about that.”
We followed.to ask what the heck they were thinking.
Nick Gemelli, who is 21, and born at least a decade after “iron my shirts” was an anti-women’s rights slogan, didn’t have much of a rationale. “I just don’t think a woman should be President,” he said.
He couldn’t really say why, but he agreed that he was a health care voter, as the sticker on his carrying case implied. The “Hillary for President” sticker was a bit more of a puzzle.
If this was a brilliant Penn-Wolfson idea to raise the sexism issue, it sure worked. Gloria Steinem wrote an OP-Ed for them the next day and Google shows 72,000 references to “Hillary + Iron my shirt”. With the exception of the Daily News blogger, no one questioned the authenticity of the hecklers.