Master of (Hillary's) Domain

So I just read Josh Green's revealing look inside the firing of Clinton's campaign manager, and the disconcerting truth that emerges is how much Hillary values loyalty over performance, a characteristic I find disturbingly echoes our current president.

But it also led me to discover this NY Times profile, which is a key article to understand the main "strategist" who is running Hillary's campaign - Mark Penn. He's the guy out making genius comments to the press over this last week. He also is CEO of a PR firm, Burson-Marstellar, that does "perception management" - spinning positive PR for tobacco companies, Saudi Arabia after 9/11, or military contracting firm Blackwater after recent controversies. Apparently created a strategy of setting up faux grassroots organizations for corporate clients to attack environmental or consumer groups. Wonderful stuff. A Hillary loyalist, he has with her during her first Senate campaign in 2000, when this article was written (after joining the Clinton cadre during the '96 election). It is incredibly illuminating even now (especially to those who wonder what I mean when I complain everything the Clintons do is calculated and focus grouped down to the word!):

For years now, aides to the Clintons have insisted that they use polls not to decide which policies to support but to learn how to persuade others to share their positions -- not to follow, in other words, but to lead. It's not true. They use polls for both purposes, and that is why to understand the state of American politics and government you need to know about Mark Penn. For the Democrats who have used market-tested ideas and language to redefine the party, he is the man who writes the questions and interprets the answers. By adding and then dividing you, turning you into a percentage and stamping you with a label, he serves as your conduit to power. And theirs.

You should know this about Penn: For the decade before Dick Morris brought him and his partner Doug Schoen to work for the Clintons, Penn served mostly corporations like Texaco and Avis. Along with corporate marketing techniques, it was a particularly corporate view of reality that he put in the service of the Clintons. He thinks about voters not just in terms of ideology -- with the cold war over, who really has one anymore? -- but in terms of lifestyle and attitude, the sitcoms they watch and the music they listen to. He searches for the little spaces where politics and government might fit between work and trips to school and soccer games.