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Mark Penn

“They were the ones who said ‘Make the ’96 election about nothing except V-Chips and school uniforms,'” says a former Clinton adviser. ~The Nation

The “they” in this case were Dick Morris and Mark Penn, who now serves as pollster and chief strategist for HRC.  This remark would tell us everything we need to know about Penn, if we didn’t already know who he was: he is someone who has  made his name on manipulating the public and preventing the representation of tens of millions of people through the worthless, “triangulated” centrist policy prescriptions that he has helped advance.  As the quote above indicates, he belongs to the school that says elections should be as vapid and irrelevant as possible.  He represents, in short, everything I despise about American politics and the political class.

about the author

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

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