Would Hillary dare smear Obama? Probably not; but Mark Penn would [View All]

[antiimperialist]

Mark Penn is Hillary's chief campaign strategist and president and founder of the polling firm Penn & Schoen. If you reviewed his past you would realize how far he would go to bring an opposing candidate down.
Penn & Schoen not only violated Venezuelan law in 2004 by releasing exit poll results at 7:30 PM, before voting concluded at 8:00 PM. but also kept the people in the dark about who really carried out the poll--according to the Associated Press, it was the opposition group "Sumate" who conducted it, although Sumate said Penn $ Schoen "supervised" the poll. On top of not disclosing this information, the exit poll ended up having a...36% margin of error! That's right. the poll was off the "yes" and the "no" votes by 18% each. This was no methodology flaw. This was a gross attempt to brainwash the population into believing the results were the opposite of what they really were, given that all international watchdogs found the elections to have been fair.

A similar scenario occurred in Mexico in 2000, when Penn & Schoen violated Mexican law by not disclosing who paid for the poll: candidate Vicente Fox, who won those elections. Mexico's largest newspaper, El Universal, condemned this violation by Penn's firm:

About the hidden sponsers (sic) of his work, Shoen limits himself to say that it is a "plural and representative group of Mexican society, including businessmen who are interested in that there by trustable results on July 2nd. According to the other partner of Shoen, Rob Allyn, the sponsors of the study "asked that their names remain secret, in order to guarantee the independence of the project and also avoid possible reprisals by the Mexican government."

Thus, Misters Schoen and Allyn say they are interested that the results of the elections of July 2nd are democratic, that is to say, clean and transparent.
But they refuse to make transparent the source of the money that pays for their work.
Why the mystery? Is it to protect the sponsors from possible reprisals of the Mexican government? This sounds like a poor excuse that Mexican society cannot swallow. In Mexico many polls with diverse results and with self-identified sponsors have been made. And what has been the problem? To the contrary, public opinion knows who to look out for.

Here is one of the minimum requirements for every pollster as cited by The American Association for Public Opinion Research:

Standards for Minimal Disclosure:
Good professional practice imposes the obligation upon all public opinion researchers to include, in any report of research results, or to make available when that report is released, certain essential information about how the research was conducted. At a minimum, the following items should be disclosed.

1. Who sponsored the survey, and who conducted it.

So far this whole Novak/Obama/Clinton allegations are devoid of specific facts or evidence, and can only be considered speculation at this point; but Penn's past actions reveal a man who would do whatever it takes to catapult his allies to the presidency while sinking his enemies, even if it means violating rules or disregarding democracy. I would not be surprised if Obama's claims turned out to be true.