Mark Penn: Boy Republican?

What with Mark Penn back in the news [1] as the most lizard-like creature in the Democratic political bestiary, I've pulled out an essay from the files that I was getting read to publish when Penn resigned from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Mark Penn, of course, is the notorious former chief Clinton strategist reviled by campaign insiders and left-leaning Democrats alike for a panoply of sins including wildly irresponsible research methodology [2], wildly irresponsible campaign advice, and wildly reactionary ideological predilections. I've got a new charge to add to the pile: a friend of mine who knew him back at Harvard claimed that Mark Penn used to be a bright-eyed college Republican.

Luckily, I was able to avail myself of one of my unusual hobbies to investigate the truth of the rumor. No, not my hobby of collecting books like The Marxist Minstrels: The Communist Subversion of Music and Brainwashing in the High Schools; my hobby of reaching back into the voluminous online archives of the Harvard Crimson (they go back to the 1800s) to revel in the Literary Juvenalia of the punditry Stars.

So it was I read every word of the output of Mark Penn Penn (AB '76), cub reporter.

What did I find? Mark Penn of the Ford Administration years was not quite the primadonna of his latter day fame; he mostly did yeoman's work, ink-stained wretch sort of low-level assignment stuff.

Click here [3] to learn which Harvard profs draw the most trick-or treaters. Want to study the budgetary minutiae of the dorm system? Read "Proctors Exhaust $2000 Fund For Beer, Soda, and 'Goodies'" [4] ("Noting a decline in drug use among freshman," dean of freshmen F. Skiddy von Stade Jr. "said there was a definite increase in beer consumption, which he has bean [sic] supporting partly through the dean's fund." With admirably dogged persistence, he followed a interminable bureaucratic battle over the location of the JFK library [5]; with professionalism and apparent objectivity, [6] he covered the gubernatorial campaign of the moderate Republican Michael Dukakis beat.

With high hopes, I pored over "Escaping the Prison House of Liberalism" [7], only to find it a mixed review of scholarly tome critiquing Lockian liberalism from the left, in which Penn shows himself, of all things, admirably conversant with Marxist theory. (What would bitter Pennsylvania working class voters say?)

And he showed admirable feminist consciousness in his review of Mather House's production of Bye-Bye Birdie—"simply sexism put to music." [8] Alas, no wingnut smoking guns yet from the pen of young Penn.

You might say the huckster liberals and fellow Clinton staffers know and hate peeks out between the lines of this jointly authorized dispatch [6] on an encyclopedia salesman who came to campus to pitch door-to-door selling as a summer job opportunity. Did freshman Penn learn a thing or two about his future calling that day: "He refused to call selling 'manipulation,' preferring the term persuasion. Describing his sales technique as 'showing them the goods and seeing if they'll buy,' he compared it 'to asking a girl out on a date.'"

And by his junior year, he begins to show a bit too intimate a familiarity with the con man's craft in this 1974 guide to buying a stereo:

Advertisers and salesmen will come at you with "the 400-millisecond miracle," "reverberent field dominant," and "silver-lined circuitry." Don't worry if you don't understand these terms; you're not supposed to. The companies are preying upon your technical ignorance and attempting to dazzle you with impressive-sounding terms so you will trust their "expert" judgment of which product is best.

Finally, be wary of new innovations until they are proven. Manufacturers are currently stuffing the market with the new quadrophonic systems. Stay away from these unless you have a large room and lots of money (at least $1000). The lower-priced models are still little more than conversation pieces.

In other words: don't bullshit a bullshitter.

But to be fair, what might be his first published poll, compiled that same year ; and methodologially , "Students Favor 1:1 Ratio, Sex Blind Admissions" [9] strikes me as quite a bit sounder than his recent work [2] (I personally began my career as a Penn hater after reading this 2003 DLC "poll" [10], an execrable piece of ideological propaganda in which he establishes, more or less, that since 76 percent of Americans support motherhood and apple pie, and since New Democrats support motherhood and apple pie, thereby 76 percent of Americans are New Democrats.)

I thought I might be drilling a dry hole.

I came upon the case of the woman Penn persistently refers to as "'Professor' Kearns"—with "Professor" in quotation marks. The Wall Street Journal''s editorialists—even then they never passed up the chance to bash a Democrat—criticized Harvard for considering her tenure on the basis of the allegedly unscholarly, polemical nature of her forthcoming Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. [6] It was to be co-authored with Kennedy family friend Richard Goodwin, whom Kearns, of course, would later marry, and whom Penn persistently labels, with Brahmin-like condescension, her "lover." One Penn feature on the story—he was apparently obsessed with it—was entitled Notes on Becoming a Baron(ess): Kearns Hasn't Published, But She Probably Won't Perish" [11]. He depicts her as a flashy hustler on the make, and when the Government department voted to hold up her tenure, snarks she "has one-by-one torn down the barricades blocking her promotion." That includes that she was canceling plans to co-author the book with Goodwin, which "ended unseemly publicity about her relationship with Goodwin, whom she has now married." Another piece concludes on this nasty note, resembling the kind of condescension Boston displayed towards Austin in the Kennedy/Johnson years: "If Kearns is denied tenure when the debate comes to an end...it will have been at the initiative of the administration, a step that would again put Harvard at the center of academic controversy and shake Kearns out of her version of the American dream." Another winds up judgementally:

Kearns has taken the year off to finish the book and iron out her personal problems. (It is her second leave in three years.) She is on probation now. If she had kept her name out of the newspapers and waited several months before announcing a change of plans, she would have been beyond the reach of the department....

This in a news article. All and all, his work on the Doris Kearns Goodwin case truly reveals the asshole we all know and despise.

Oh, and by the way, what about Penn-as-Republican? It shows up in one of those apparently fair on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand strategic assessments that actually heavily stack the deck in favor of one side. The side is Rihard Nixon's, [12] who, he says, shouldn't in all fairness be impeached. First, he defends the firing of the special prosecutor as fair, because Archibald Cox was supposedly blinded by partisanship:

Nixon abandoned the principle of executive privilege but has profited by shedding himself of the "quasi-constitutional" mechanism of the special prosecutor. However balanced investigation by Archibald Cox '34 may have been, the idea of a Kennedy Democrat who filled his top four investigative posts with fellow Kennedy Democrats could not have been pleasing to the administration. Nixon decided over the weekend that a bi-partisan House inquiry and a friendlier judicial arrangement would be preferable to Archibald Cox and his staff of 80 crack lawyers examining all the president's activities and papers. If Congress tries to appoint a new special prosecutor, the president and the Republicans will be in a position to secure guarantees that the new attorneys are not "out to get the President."

Then he says was how JFK would have supposed Dick Nixon on the question:

The late President John F. Kennedy '40, would have condemned a political impeachment of Nixon just as he abhorred in Profiles in Courage, the attempt to oust Andrew Johnson. Whether the issue is over secret bombings of Cambodia or a militarily imposed reconstruction of the South, the public and Congress should oppose an impeachment which places the opposition party in power.

(He wasn't below Kennedy-baiting when it comes to Doris Kearns Goodwin, though not above Kennedy-worship when that served his rhetorical purposes, too.)

The he insisted that if the rabid haters insist on impeachment, which seemed to be unavoidable, the decent thing to do would be to fix the trial in favor of the President. Because, with Spiro Agnew about to resign (this article appears to have been drafted during the brief window between Spiro Agnew's [13] October plea of no confidence for bribery in exchange for an agreement to resign but before the designation of Gerald Ford as his successor: a Democratic Congress would surely use the opportunity to effect a quick coup and install a Democratic President—a fantastic bit of paranoia all that rage at jut that moment with Republicans who knew that Tricky Dick had been nailed dead to rights for shredding the Constitution, but fiendishly laimed saving his skin as the only honorable course to preserve Constitutional "continuity of government":

Conviction should be avoided not only because it is rash and precedent-setting, but also because it raises serious political questions. Carl Albert would be a weak executive, under the control of the Democrats in Congress. Gerald Ford would be incompetent, especially in international affairs. Perhaps what will finally keep Nixon in office will be the reluctance of Congress to replace him with either of these men.

By changing the succession act or negotiating a resignation deal, Congress could select a new president. The Democrats, however, would be faced with the divisive task of choosing one of their own to take control of the government. Whenever possible, courts avoid ruling on constitutional issues to preserve the consistency and the continuity of the law. Congress, in considering impeachment and conviction, must be prepared to do the same to preserve the government.

Mark Penn: come clean! When did you come to the conclusion that Richard Nixon no longer deserved to be president? And when did you stop beating Democrats?