Ann Kornblut's 2,800 word, front-page must-read
profile in yesterday's Washington
Post of Clinton
pollster and "chief strategist" Mark Penn has been stirring up quite a bit of
critical commentary on the left side of the blogosphere. Although Media Matters takes the
piece to task for speculating without "any evidence" that "American voters
‘suffer[] from Clinton fatigue,'" most are critical
of Penn. Greg
Sargent questions what Kornblut described as Penn's "deep roots in the
national security wing of the Democratic party." Both Mark
Schmitt and Matthew
Iglesias take exception to what Kornblut described as Penn's "undisputed
brilliance" as a Pollster.
Others focus on Penn's corporate conflicts. "In the 1980s," Matt Stoller writes, "[C]entrists
like Penn . . . were often on retainer to tobacco, telecom and pharma because
it was good business to have influential consultants on their payroll." Similarly,
David
Sirota asks, "could Mark Penn and the Clinton
team be any more of a walking advertisement for corruption, insiderism and
limousine liberalism?"
Here are the two key paragraphs on that subject from Kornblut's
article:
The job [worldwide chief executive of the public
relations firm Burson-Marsteller] is the latest iteration of the lucrative
corporate work that Penn and Schoen began in the 1980s, at the same time they
were making their names as political pollsters, and that put them in the
company of a new generation of business-minded Democratic consultants.Among their clients over the years were ATT, Eli
Lilly, Texaco and Microsoft. Their specialty was corporate research and
positioning -- figuring out, for example, how AT&T could outflank
competitor MCI by targeting uncommitted customers, the business equivalent of
seeking out swing voters. While some Democratic rivals criticized the crossover
work, suggesting that Penn had sold out or worse, the polling firm expanded
rapidly, with Penn and Schoen adapting corporate models to the political sphere
and vice versa.
I have two thoughts to add, although readers should remember that that until
last fall, I worked for 20 years as a Democratic campaign pollster and thus
technically qualified as a "Democratic rival" (although in terms of clients, I was
certainly not in Penn's league).
First, yes, as Mark Schmitt writes,
"life is full of conflicts." Penn and Schoen are certainly not the first Democratic
consultants to take on corporate clients, nor will they be the last. And yes, as
Schmitt puts it, "everyone in Washington
has at least two jobs," or at least it sometimes seems that way. However, Penn
and Schoen have displayed a thirst for corporate work, often in conflict with the
policy agendas of their political clients, that has long set the bar among Democratic
pollsters. My employers and partners over the years had corporate lines they (variously)
refused to cross -- tobacco, pharma, big oil, aggressively anti-union -- both out
of ideological principle and to avoid putting their valued political clients in
a tough spot. A quick glance at the Penn,
Schoen, Berland client list shows they not only crossed some of those
lines, but did so with enthusiasm.
One personal irony is that while I have never met Mark Penn, my one or two encounters
with his former partner Doug Schoen were the result of a mutual corporate client,
America Online, Inc. For eight years, I conducted customer satisfaction surveys
for AOL -- something that provided a big chunk of my annual income -- while
Schoen did research focused more on AOL's advertising and corporate image. I
was fortunate that my work for AOL never posed a direct conflict with my
political clients, at least, none that I was aware of. But it certainly could
have. Consider a hypothetical example: What if I had been polling for an
Attorney General who had filed a lawsuit against the company and wanted to
highlight that action as a message in a campaign? It would be absurd to argue
that my advice to that candidate would be unaffected, even subconsciously, by my
regular stream of income from the corporate client.
These sorts of ethical questions are difficult, and I assume that my
colleagues in the consulting world find the harsh criticism from the "Netroots"
highly annoying. But these are important issues, and the bloggers are right to
ask tough questions. Many campaign pollsters chose to avoid lucrative corporate
projects to avoid creating conflicts for their valued political clients. As
such, it seems entirely fair to hold candidates accountable for the apparent
conflicts of interest of their influential consultants.