Penn Leaking Ink

I saw the Hardball appearance that Ezra Klein references as well, and it was riveting. I don't know if I'd ever seen Mark Penn live on television before, and he was uniformly awful, especially when he tried to not-so-subtly bring up Obama's cocaine use again. Joe Trippi called him on it immediately, and it became a total mess. Here's Ezra:

My hunch, right now, is that if Clinton goes down, Penn is going to be blamed. You can see the knives coming out already, but he really does a poor job here, and he's hampered not merely by his shortcomings as a speaker, but by the absence of message within the Clinton campaign. When the rationale for your campaign is that you're the frontrunner with the experience to win, losing your lead in the polls doesn't only put you in second place, it actually shreds the argument for your candidacy. What we're beginning to see here is how underdeveloped the arguments for Clinton were when separated from her aura of inevitability.

You can also see Trippi trying to position Edwards as above the fray of a Clinton-Obama food fight, and apparently Iowans are buying that. But it's not really true. It's a one-sided food fight, with the Clintons flailing away in an old style of politics. This is because, as Ezra notes, there's no rationale for her campaign. She's running on the name Clinton, as a re-election campaign, more than anything else. I made this argument earlier this week, that her candidacy is entirely about how she's in first place. It's really Iowa or bust for Clinton, and it didn't have to be that way. That's entirely a fault of positioning, and a fault of Mark Penn.