Gee... do you think????

Insightful that Penn.
Actually, lots of people (like um, most people) imagine that losing the caucuses lost her the election.

I wish I could make millions making super obvious statements.

No wonder she lost with brain power like this at the helm. I would seriously sue him for political malpractice if I were the Clintons. Not that she doesn't deserve to lose for hiring an idiot like this in the first place...

with insights like these he could get a job as a pundit on TV

How many lame excuses can dance inside the skull of a Penn Head?

"That simple fact may just have had a lot more to do with who won than anyone imagines."

Ahem, Mr. Penn Head; Team Obama, imagined it,
from the start; that is why they planned the
Caucus Play, and Played The Caucus Plan.

For a multimillion dollar employee, this guy sure is an underperformer.

Harold Ickes looked like a total loser in the RBC meeting; and Howard Wolfson talks like a moron.

Hillary, her husband and their entire team is a bunch of losers. No wonder they lost. Get this woman out of the public view NOW. Her endorsement and indeed her presence harms the Democratic party far more than it helps.

The uneducated, low-information hicks who helped Hillary win would have voted for anybody running against a black candidate.

You simply HAVE to judge the candidate on the folks she/he picks to run the campaign. It is the first indication of the sort of leader, manager, judge of ability, etc. of a would-be POTUS..

Clinton showed very clearly what sort of disorganized mess her White House would have been. The more of her supporters that can see that (and more quickly) the better for the whole Democratic party.

The campaign should have done a better job at contesting the caucuses.

Duh. Anybody with a pulse who has been paying attention at all has known that truth for months. It is amazing that Penn is just catching on.

Something else is happening. The 50 state strategy and internet fundraising are moving power to the people and weakening the hands of top down Washington folk like Mark Penn and the rest of the air warriors. Maybe the smart ones in the Clinton camp will eventually figure it out, but Obama's success is directly attributable to his superior ability to organize a ground game which translated to victory after victory in caucus states. The ability to do well with the ground game also encouraged a lot of supers interested in party building to abandon the Clintons.

Mark Penn and his Clinton campaign were soooooo 90s.

Okay, speaking of brainiacs -
The GE can't possibly be this easy.

Who in the hell is running the McCain campaign? Can't they hire an intern to watch 20 years of video and go through McCain's voting record?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPyKpcivQYQ

I can't stand this guy and it has little to do with his political positions and way more to do with his ineptitude at his trade. More than Obama's insurgent campaign or all the grassroots inspiration the senator engendered, Mark Penn is the single biggest reason Hillary Clinton lost.

She should have fired Mark Penn after the Iowa caucuses, or better yet, never hired him in the first place and hired David Axelrod instead. I think we all know that not seriously contesting the caucuses is the single biggest thing that led to her defeat and I none of us were paid millions of dollars by her campaign.

Believe it or not, I have read many accounts where she strongly considered hiring Axelrod in over Penn in 2006 to run her polling operation.

Who gives a crap what Penn has to say? You lost because you had a worse candidate and a worse campaign team. Simple as that.

Other than that, and you screwing up Hillary's campaign to a fare-thee-well, how was the play, Mr. Penn?

Damn, I wanna be in the room when he admits to Hillary he was WRONG, so wrong.

BTW how much of her debt does she "owe" him?

If I was her, I'd tell him sue me, with his admissions of total incompetence like this as exhibit #1

It all came down to shit for brains. They had too many brain farts.

"We should have taken on Mr. Obama more directly and much earlier, and we needed a different kind of operation to win caucuses and to retain the support of superdelegates," Penn writes.

Penn adds shortly afterward: "Given her successes in high-turnout primary elections and defeats in low-turnout caucuses, that simple fact may just have had a lot more to do with who won than anyone imagines."

Wow. Just...wow.

Despite all of the arguing between Clintonites and Obamanians, it strikes me that I've never really heard anyone defend the wit and wisdom of Mark Penn.

The funny thing is that when you consider how ferociously some of Clinton's supporters held on to her campaign hopes (not so much the Republican trolls), you'd think she'd have been the one cleaning up in the caucus states. Not the relatively unknown guy with the funny name.

Not only is Penn's observation a "Duh!" but I'm also wondering why so many of our stories in this section are merely excerpted from that obscure source The New York Times or other mass publications. Most of us will have read most of what is being posted many hours before it appears here. (As with the story about Obama's looking at Clinton staffers for his campaign.)

But I got all excited when I saw the headline about "contesting" caucuses. I thought it WAS real news -- that Penn thought they should have contested the results -- as when a person contests a will. When Eric really meant that they should have competed actively in the caucus process itself.

No wonder this guy gets the big bucks.

Lets just tell it like it is. He's a lousy organizer

Eric

The game was over long time back. Your gal lost comprehensively in the end.

All this postmortem is meaningless and is wasting internet GB's.

So give it up already and do some real reporting from now on.

Did you read the headline of the article this piece refers to? The article ends with the complaint that they did not have enough money, they were beaten by someone with more money.

As for thisniss' comment about legally contesting the caucuses, that's exactly what they did in Texas, and I presume, elsewhere. In Texas, last month, LULAC filed suit in federal court alleging the primacaucus violated the Voting Rights Act --- the complaint being that Hispanics were underrepresented in the Texas delegate selection process, a process which rewards counties with higher voter turnout with more delegates. The Hispanic areas in Texas were allotted fewer delegates to the state convention because of declining voter turnout in recent years.

Never mind that many of the persons complaining loudest had themselves sat on committees in the state or national party and had selected delegates based on these same rules in previous elections.

The case was dismissed.

Noticeably absent was any mention of the fact that Penn, HRC's strategy genius, concluded that HRC didn't need a strategy for post-Super Tuesday campaigning and so didn't have one at the ready. (Of course, HRC's hubristic acceptance of that thinking was equally fatal to her campaign.) Penn et al. believed she was the inevitable nominee who would become the presumptive nominee once the polls closed.

So failure to embrace the 50-state strategy bit HRC's campaign in the ass. The only question I have is, did they learn something?

Penn needs to spend some quality time in Hell.