Isn't it Time for Mark Penn to Leave Burson-Marsteller?
Posted November 12, 2007 | 11:18 AM (EST)
My colleague at The Nation, Ari Berman, has done more than any journalist to shine some light on how pollster-strategist Mark Penn, head honcho at PR giant Burson-Marsteller, and perhaps the most important figure in Hillary Clinton's campaign, poses a real dilemma for the candidate. Penn heads a firm that has represented everyone from union busters to big tobacco, and more recently Blackwater. (According to a Marsteller spokesperson, it was a subsidiary, BKSH & Associates, run by GOP operative Charlie Black, which helped Erik Prince prepare for congressional hearings after his employees killed civilians in Iraq).It would seem difficult to find a more controversial client than Blackwater but Penn's firm has just been retained by Spin Master.
Who is Spin Master? It turns out that Spin Master distributes Aqua Dots, a toy that was recalled last week because it contains a glue ingredient that when ingested is broken down by the body to make GHB, the "date rape" drug, which can cause unconsciousness and even death. (The Consumer Product Safety Commission says the number of children sickened by Aqua Dots has risen from two to nine in the past week.)
Penn has repeatedly stated that he has no direct contact with controversial clients like Blackwater or unionbusters. But what about the good old-fashioned American principles of responsibility and accountability -- principles which his candidate likes to invoke on the campaign trail? As Ari Berman has pointed out, the dilemma for Clinton is that Penn's firm represents many of the interests whose influence she has vowed to curtail. But as kids get sick from poisonous toys, how can Clinton keep in her corner, as her chief strategist, a man who has even limited involvement with a firm like Burson-Marsteller? Isn't it time that Clinton ask Penn to choose: my campaign to make this a safer country or a PR firm which has too many clients undermining that agenda?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/katrina-vanden-heuvel/isnt-it-time-for-mark-pe_b_72206.html"In '06, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57% of Campaign Contrib to GOP"
Polling Czar
After the 1994 election, Democrats had just lost both houses of Congress, and President Clinton was floundering in the polls. At the urging of his wife, he turned to Dick Morris, a friend from their time in Arkansas. Morris brought in two pollsters from New York, Doug Schoen and his partner, Mark Penn, a portly, combative workaholic. Morris decided what to poll and Penn polled it. They immediately pushed Clinton to the right, enacting the now-infamous strategy of "triangulation," which co-opted Republican policies like welfare reform and tax cuts and emphasized small-bore issues that supposedly cut across the ideological divide. "They were the ones who said, 'Make the '96 election about nothing except V-chips and school uniforms,'" says a former adviser to Bill. When Morris got caught with a call girl, Penn became the most important adviser in Clinton's second term. "In a White House where polling is virtually a religion," the Washington Post reported in 1996, "Penn is the high priest."
Penn, who had previously worked in the business world for companies like Texaco and Eli Lilly, brought his corporate ideology to the White House. After moving to Washington he aggressively expanded his polling firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland (PSB). It was said that Penn was the only person who could get Bill Clinton and Bill Gates on the same line. Penn's largest client was Microsoft, and he saw no contradiction between working for both the plaintiff and the defense in what was at the time the country's largest antitrust case. A variety of controversial clients enlisted PSB. The firm defended Procter & Gamble's Olestra from charges that the food additive caused anal leakage, blamed Texaco's bankruptcy on greedy jurors and market-tested genetically modified foods for Monsanto. PSB introduced to consulting the concept of "inoculation": shielding corporations from scandal through clever advertising and marketing.
In 2000 Penn became the chief architect of Hillary's Senate victory in New York, persuading her, in a rerun of '96, to eschew big themes and relentlessly focus on poll-tested pothole politics, such as suburban transit lines and dairy farming upstate. Following that election, Penn became a very rich man--and an even more valued commodity in the business world (Hillary paid him $1 million for her re-election campaign in '06 and $277,000 in the first quarter of this year). The massive PR empire WPP Group acquired Penn's polling firm for an undisclosed sum in 2001 and four years later named him worldwide CEO of one of its most prized properties, the PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M). A key player in the decision to hire Penn was Howard Paster, President Clinton's chief lobbyist to Capitol Hill and an influential presence inside WPP. "Clients of stature come to Mark constantly for counsel," says Paster, who informally advises Hillary, explaining the hire. The press release announcing Penn's promotion noted his work "developing and implementing deregulation informational programs for the electric utilities industry and in the financial services sector." The release blithely ignored how utility deregulation contributed to the California electricity crisis manipulated by Enron and the blackout of 2003, which darkened much of the Northeast and upper Midwest.
Burson-Marsteller is hardly a natural fit for a prominent Democrat. The firm has represented everyone from the Argentine military junta to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which thousands were killed when toxic fumes were released by one of its plants, to Royal Dutch Shell, which has been accused of colluding with the Nigerian government in committing major human rights violations. B-M pioneered the use of pseudo-grassroots front groups, known as "astroturfing," to wage stealth corporate attacks against environmental and consumer groups. It set up the National Smokers Alliance on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s. Its current clients include major players in the finance, pharmaceutical and energy industries. In 2006, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57 percent of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates.
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070604/bermanNOW HERE IS SOME INFO ON PSB:
PSB and the 2004 Venezuelan recall election
PSB received negative attention for polling it did during the August 2004 Venezuelan recall election of President Hugo Chavez:<8>
"Exit Poll Results Show Major Defeat for Chavez" the survey, conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, asserted even as Sunday's voting was still on. But in fact, the opposite was true - Chavez ended up trouncing his enemies and capturing 59 percent of the vote.
PSB's Venezuela poll raised eyebrows for several reasons: the opposition to Hugo Chavez seized upon it as proof that "the results from the vote itself were fraudulent"; the poll results "were sent out by fax and e-mail to media outlets and opposition offices more than four hours before polls closed," in violation of Venezuelan law; "members of Sumate, a Venezuelan group that helped organize the recall initiative,
the fieldwork for the poll"; and remarks to media went beyond poll results and analysis to election commentary - Mark Penn told Associated Press that Doug Schoen "believes there were more problems with the voting than with the exit poll."<9>
PSB and the Serbian elections in 2000
Interestingly, PSB was involved in similar charges of "American political interference in Serbia, locus of a $77 million U.S. effort to do with ballots what NATO bombs could not--get rid of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. In the run-up to national elections on Sept. 24, U.S. aid officials and contractors are working to strengthen Serbia's famously fractured democratic opposition. They have helped train its organizers, equipped their offices with computers and fax machines and provided opposition parties with sophisticated voter surveys compiled by the same New York firm that conducts polls for President Clinton" -- PSB.<10>
Jonathan Mowat has a more incisive appraisal of PSB as follows:
Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB) has played a pioneering role in the use of polling operations, especially "exit polls," in facilitating coups. Its primary mission is to shape the perception that the group installed into power in a targeted country has broad popular support. The group began work in Serbia during the period that its principle, Mark Penn, was President Clinton's top political advisor.<11>
PSB and the expected Italian elections in 2006
At the beginning of 2006, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi ordered PBS (via his party Forza Italia) to conduct a survey on the next Italian elections (of April 9, 2006). The results showed Berlusconi's coalition winning, while all other surveys by Italian pollsters showed the opposition winning. The Penn, Shoen & Berland Italian survey results can be seen here. Other news reports on this contested survey are here and here.
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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Penn%2C_Schoen_%26_Berland
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