by Rick Pearson
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign won’t comment on how involved Mark Penn, its former chief strategist, remains in developing strategy, but it says rival Barack Obama should be measured on how his campaign acted when his top economic strategist was found to have met with Canadian officials and discussed trade.
Moreover, the Clinton campaign is pointing to the remarks of a major Obama surrogate, Teamsters head Jimmy Hoffa, who told reporters on a conference call that Obama’s top economic strategist Austan Goolsbee should clarify what happened at a meeting in which Canadian officials said Goolsbee described Obama’s criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement as campaign rhetoric.
On Sunday, Clinton’s campaign announced that Penn had quit as senior strategist following revelations that he met with Colombian officials on behalf of his public relations firm, which had a contract to push a Bush administration trade pact with that nation that the New York senator opposes. At the time, the Clinton campaign said Penn would still provide some advice.
But questions have swirled around whether Penn has really taken a diminished role in formulating Clinton’s message strategy. The Atlantic quoted one Clinton aide as saying Penn, who has worked for both of the Clintons, remains a “key” adviser.
Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s chief spokesman, told reporters they should liken Penn’s demotion to someone who was “editor in chief of a newspaper and somebody who plays an important role in the newspaper but isn’t in charge,” a difference, he said, that was “clear to anyone in the workplace.” But Wolfson, who has had his own clashes with Penn, wouldn’t say how involved Penn was in campaign conference calls involving strategy. “That’s just not a line that I’m going to cross.”Instead, Wolfson went on to describe Penn’s “appropriate” action in giving up his chief strategist role and compared it to the case of Goolsbee, where revelations about his meeting with the Canadians right before last month’s Ohio primary tended to undercut Obama’s calls for labor and environmental changes in NAFTA.
“In the situation of Austan Goolsbee, we know that he went and spoke with the Canadians, that he told them that Sen. Obama’s position on NAFTA was just rhetoric, that it was not something he intended to follow through on,” Wolfson said.
“The Obama campaign gave a series of shifting answers when pressed about this, first saying that the meeting hadn’t occurred, then saying that NAFTA had not come up, and then saying he had not said what he said,” Wolfson said. “And when all that was said and done, no action was taken with regard to that individual. That is not accountability and it is not candor and it is not transparency.”
Wolfson gleefully cited a conference call that the Obama campaign had with reporters featuring Hoffa, who said Goolsbee should “make a statement” about the meeting and “end this mystery about what happened.” The Obama campaign has maintained that the Canadians misreported Goolsbee’s comments about NAFTA.
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Of course, the matter is a bit more muddled when Politico reported that Wolfson, Clinton’s top spokesman who has been designated to help replace Penn in message management, also has an interest in a public relations firm that also has a contract with the Colombians to promote the trade deal that Clinton opposes.
Obama’s campaign said in a statement that the Clinton team’s efforts to distance themselves from Penn were “laughable” and “typical of a candidate who has said one thing but done another this entire campaign.”