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Joe BidenCongratulations to our presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden!
 

crazytown

(7,277 posts)
Mon Dec 30, 2019, 05:11 PM Dec 2019

The next time you see a HarrisX, Harvard Harris poll on DU

He was always Mr. Centrist. He was banished from Hillaryland after 2008. He goes on Fox. (Now he's advising trump on Impeachment)

Mark Penn, What the $! Were You Doing in Donald Trump’s White House?

(snip) Penn was Clinton’s pollster and, for a time, chief strategist in her 2008 bid for the presidency. He had urged her to “slander” Obama for his “lack of American roots,” advice Clinton didn’t take, recalls Jonah Blank, a former Senate Foreign Relations committee aide. “He was promoting a racist ‘birther’ dog-whistle strategy long before Trump found it Blank told The Daily Beast.

Penn had written in a 2007 memo to Clinton that Obama’s diverse, multicultural boyhood in Indonesia and Hawaii “exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

Penn has long been considered a “malign” force by Democrats, as one put it to me in an email, part of the cast of characters like pollster Dick Morris who had sway over the Clintons in the 1990s. Together with Morris, Penn gained notoriety for “triangulation,” steering Bill Clinton away from House Democrats and closer to the Republicans who won control of Congress two years into his presidency.

The ploy angered Democrats, but it worked: Clinton got re-elected. But over time—accelerated by Hillary’s loss to the insurgent Obama in ’08—Penn’s centrist approach to politics lost its luster in a party moving to the progressive left. When Clinton ran again in 2016, she did not hire Penn, leaving him on the outside for yet another presidential cycle.

Democrats theorize that Penn was angry about that, but his exile from Hillaryland put a mark on him. He ended up accepting an offer from Fox News, appearing regularly to opine about how Democrats were going off the rails, and to suggest Hillary might be readying another White House run. After learning that Penn had met with Trump, Obama strategist David Axelrod tweeted, “All that bootlicking on Fox News finally paid off for Mark Penn. He’s finally a White House insider again.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mark-penn-what-the-dollarand-were-you-doing-in-donald-trumps-white-house

EDIT: It's time of the week again! Bloomberg surges to 11%! Game on !
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/476689-bloomberg-rises-to-third-place-alongside-warren-in-national-poll
If I were to vote in a presidential
primary today, I would vote for:
Undecided
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The next time you see a HarrisX, Harvard Harris poll on DU (Original Post) crazytown Dec 2019 OP
Yepper spot on............................. turbinetree Dec 2019 #1
Kicking for 'Big' Mike's HarrisX surge! crazytown Jan 2020 #2
 

turbinetree

(24,695 posts)
1. Yepper spot on.............................
Mon Dec 30, 2019, 05:29 PM
Dec 2019
If I were to vote in a presidential
primary today, I would vote for:
Undecided
Latest Discussions»Retired Forums»Democratic Primaries»The next time you see a H...