The Cedar Lounge Revolution

An enormously entertaining report by Michael Tomasky in the Guardian yesterday points to a basic truth about the current US Presidential nomination campaign. He writes about the trouble at the top of the Clinton campaign:

Enter with me now into the exciting and furtive world of Mark Penn, international man of intrigue. Penn is the top consultant for Hillary Clinton, a job for which his firm has so far been paid around $11m.

$11m. Good God. That’s a figure to conjure with. But no, as Tomasky notes, in some respects it’s not.

But that’s just Penn’s cover – he works for this thing called the “Clinton campaign” in much the same way that James Bond works for “Universal Exports”. After all, the Clinton campaign is, by its nature, ephemeral. Even if it’s more successful than most people now imagine it will be, it can last only until November.

And so the $11m assignment is really an afterthought. Penn’s actual job is chief executive of the grandly named PR giant Burson-Marsteller Worldwide. And if you thought that overseeing the “messaging” of a presidential campaign might be fulltime work – well, how naive can you be, really?

Very, it would appear…

Because last Monday, you see, Penn found time to meet Colombia’s ambassador to the United States. The South American nation hired Penn’s firm to help the Colombian trade deal – which was signed by the two countries’ presidents in 2006 – win congressional approval.

You might think that with his candidate currently campaigning in a very anti-free trade state, Pennsylvania, and with his candidate having made a big stink last month over supposed trade hypocrisy on Barack Obama’s part when an adviser to his campaign had similar contacts with Canadian officials, Penn would have thought twice about doing this. But again you would just be showing that you don’t understand how the big leagues operate. Penn’s not going to be able to live forever on that $11m, you know.

But it is the contradictory nature of this political approach which is arguably hugely hypocritical. Is there an element of principle at work here, other than how much money can be given? But as Tomasky notes:

Pennism is a kind of Democratic politics that one could argue was right for an era of conservative dominance: take few risks, and move as far to the centre and even right as possible so you couldn’t be labelled soft on defence or wobbly on support for the free market.

The Guardian echoes this today in it’s editorial. Doesn’t it say it all that these sort of sums can be thrown around with impunity. For those of us already cynical about the processes involved it points to the reality of how money distorts political endeavour, indeed how it distorts politics itself in terms of policy. Is it possible to move on from here? Well, with luck. Penn has resigned, but he’s merely indicative of the problem, his departure doesn’t in an of itself solve it. And his tale merely reflects upon a sort of Faustian bargain between progressive politics (of a sort) and finance.

Moreover while I’d love to believe the following:

What Democrat voters want, and arguably what America wants too, is not a reminder of how far right a centrist president can be pushed, (the leitmotif of the Clinton/Blair era) but how much distance a new president can put between him or herself and Mr Bush, possibly the worst president in US history. America’s desire for a fresh start is so obvious it is hard to underestimate, but Hillary and Bill Clinton have been making a good stab at it, propelled by the need to re-fight the battles of the past.

I cannot for the life of me see how structurally this ‘fresh start’ is possible. Although good to read that:

It took a union coalition against Mr Penn to force his eventual demotion.

Sometimes, like the cavalry, they come through in the end…
Meanwhile out on the campaign trail we learn that:

Mr Obama has drawn level with Mrs Clinton in the latest opinion polls in Pennsylvania, and it is now possible to imagine him winning the state, which only a month ago was hers for the taking. If Mrs Clinton wins Pennsylvania on April 22 and North Carolina and Indiana on May 6, she will be entitled to battle on, forcing the superdelegates to make the decision that the voters could not quite make themselves. But if she falters again, and the day she will know will be May 7, it will surely be time to bring an end to one of the most fractious Democratic nominations in living memory.

Drawing level? If Obama is close, or close enough, that must fundamentally mean a reappraisal of the Clinton campaign, mustn’t it?