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Like gossip columnists and paparazzi chasing a hot story, the media have been all over Hillary Clinton’s staff change; unfortunately she fired the wrong person. The real problem person is chief strategist Mark Penn, the man who coined the term “soccer moms,” not campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, who “resigned” on Sunday.
Penn is the one most responsible for putting her in a situation where she now has become something of an underdog rather than the consensus front-runner. His reputation rests on his mastering of what demographers and marketing strategists term “microtargeting,” a methodology Penn himself invoked in his book Microtrends, whose cover sports an endorsement by none other than Bill Clinton. In the introduction Penn wrote:
You can’t understand the world any more only in terms of “megatrends” or universal experiences. If you want to operate successfully you have to understand the intense identity groups that are growing and moving, fast and furious, in crisscrossing directions. (p. xx.)
Mark Penn is also Worldwide President and CEO of Burson-Marsteller (B-M), which modestly notes on its website:
In 1983, Burson-Marsteller became the world’s largest public relations firm.
Penn’s affiliation with B-M (insert your pun in the comments section) and the Clinton campaign has come to the attention of a wide-ranging group that includes both The Nation and Fox News. The question they all ask: how can a man whose client list includes Ford Motor Company, Merck, Verizon, BP, McDonald’s and Microsoft (He has been a key adviser to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer since 1998) also manage a presidential campaign? A year ago Ari Berman wrote in The Nation:
Is what’s good for Penn and his business good for Hillary’s political career? And furthermore, can she convincingly claim to fight for the average American with Penn guiding strategy in her corner?
Berman particularly singles out B-M’s extensive ties to the Republican Party as well as its anti-union activity. Her article created a firestorm last summer. In an article cited in the Working Californians blog, Karen Ackerman, AFL-CIO political director told the Los Angeles Times:
“Learning that Mark Penn was CEO of a company that in fact conducts some of its business busting unions was very, very problematic to the AFL-CIO, as well as to many other unions, and we made that clear” to the Clinton campaign. “This is an issue that continues.”
Yet the issue apparently does not continue. The unions came very close to forcing Penn’s resignation, but somehow he and Clinton have managed to slip out of this one, because Ackerman and others have not brought the Penn issue up this year.
The more interesting question Berman raises is whether Clinton’s centrist strategy, which Penn has orchestrated, comes from Penn’s ties to corporate America. As Berman points out, Penn has pushed this idea since as far back as 1994, when then Clinton aide Dick Morris brought him in after the disastrous 1994 election and advised Bill Clinton to move to the right.
Berman claims this was the beginning of “triangulation,” but in fact Dick Morris first coined the term when Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, as has been noted by various Clinton biographers. And as this blog pointed out, Bill Clinton has long been a centrist even without Dick Morris or Mark Penn. In short, Mark Penn did not make the Clintons into “centrists,” as Berman seems to imply. All you need to do to confirm that is go to the pages of the Democratic Leadership Council and read the speech by DLC Founder and CEO Al From which shows Bill Clinton wanted to take the Democratic Party to the right long before Mark Penn walked into the Oval Office.
The real place where Mark Penn has failed Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party lies in the centerpiece of his career–microtargeting. When advertisers microtarget they already know their audience from data they have gathered–and paid for– about who buys their product, right down to what census tracts they live in and what kind of toothpaste they use. They merely need to craft a message that will appeal to these groups. Lately political campaigns have started using the same tools.
As I wrote last week:
The ads you see, the speeches you hear, the sound bites that make the news, the literature you get in the mail (or whether you get any at all), the evening phone calls all owe a considerable debt to clustering.
Penn’s microtargeting has failed Clinton in two crucial ways. First, he obviously needs to recheck his samples, because clearly Barack Obama has struck a chord with voters that the Clinton campaign had not anticipated. One reason is an old polling/questionnaire truism–it is difficult to measure intensity. The more stable the environment, the better microtargeting works. When an unexpected fad hits, whether it is Barack Obama or pet rocks, it takes awhile for the data munchers to catch up. Penn still is playing catch-up as witness the latest “make-over” of Clinton as an “outsider,” which if Penn pulls it off will be akin to remaking George Bush as Franklin Roosevelt.
What Penn fails to understand is that he has positioned Hillary Clinton as what James MacGregor Burns would call a “transactional leader,” someone who practices “pragmatic” politics based on old-fashioned wheeling and dealing. In his book Leadership, Burns wrote for a transactional leader:
Relationships are dominated by quick calculations of costs-benefits. (p. 258)
This is the root of Penn’s positioning of Clinton as “experienced,” his code-word for being good at Washington deal-making. I’m not a big fan of Wikipedia, but their entry on transactional leadership fits the Clinton situation perfectly:
Transactional leaders tend to be directive and sometimes dominating.
The problem with positioning Clinton as a transactional leader is that she is running against a transformational leader in Barack Obama, and if she wins, she will run against another one in John McCain. Transformational leaders, according to Burns, who first coined the term, focus on “end-values such as liberty, justice, equality.” Whether Obama or McCain truly ARE transformational leaders is the subject for another essay, but their campaigns are designed to position them as transformational and so far the media and the public have bought it.
America in 2008 does not want a transactional president. George Bush positioned himself as a transactional president and people seem to have had enough of George Bush. There also is something even more fundamental going on: poll after poll confirms Americans of all political persuasions believe the nation has lost its way. When a nation loses its way, it needs to recover its sense of purpose. You don’t recover a lost moral compass by bargaining for it, you recover it by affirming what it stands for.
If Hillary Clinton tries to run a transactional campaign against John McCain, she will lose. The problem is, can she reposition herself after Penn’s screw-up? For a brief moment in New Hampshire she did take on transformational qualities. It is also true, that despite, Penn’s packaging, many women see Clinton as transformational, which means Clinton is getting their votes despite Penn’s efforts, not because of them.
You also don’t recover transformational leadership by focusing on microtargeting, which is Penn’s second mistake. Many of us writing about the 2008 campaign are as guilty of focusing on microtrends as Hillary Rodham Clinton and her staff. With exit polls becoming the box scores of politics we can quickly find out how many women aged 40-50, with a college degree, married and earning $40,000 voted for which candidate. But do we really know why? Everybody is focusing on the trees and not seeing the forest.
Think about coverage of the 2008 election and ask how much of it has any relationship to transformational leadership—other than their evoking of the term to describe Barack Obama? Remember what Burns wrote: transformational leadership is about values. But no one in the media is talking about values. No one in the media is pressing the candidates to say anything about their values. Do you remember any values questions in the debates so far?
It is here we come to the real danger of Mark Penn and his microtargeting. At its heart, microtargeting as Penn envisions it is about manipulating groups, wheeling and dealing images the way transactional leaders make deals in Washington. Burns would say, there are no end values in microtargeting other than winning. Penn’s microtargeting is like an ad, perhaps flashy at first, but ultimately empty of any meaning. It’s about what’s wrong in America today.
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