Too bad for Penn that losing primaries and caucuses is a VERY reliable indicator of who is NOT going to be the nominee. And Clinton's lost 10 in a row.

And Mark Penn is like my ass: both spout gas.

You're giving his argument a lot more credit than it deserves. It's certainly true that polls this far in advance of the general election are not a reliable predictor of the final results. But for this argument to have any real application to Hillary's campaign to be the nominee, Penn would need historical examples showing that losing candidates for the nomination ended up out-performing the winning ones in the general election. Unfortunately, such historical examples are, of course, non-existent. What you're left with is the choice of comparing somewhat unreliable data (poll results this far in advance) to pure speculation/wishful thinking (polls show HRC getting killed against McCain, but who knows! she could do way better! - now where's my pony).
Not much of an argument. And the fact that she keeps consistently failing (with the one exception of NH) to signficantly outperform advance polls makes it even less convincing.

I'm for Obama, but I agree that you can't make too much of the head-to-head polls at this point.

i swear: obama supporters are going to make me support clinton after all.

it is a simple fact that february polling is meaningless come november.

it is a simple fact that carter had a huge lead at one point in '76 and barely won.

it is a simple fact that dukakis came out of the convention with a huge lead and lost.

it is a simple fact that kerry came out of the convention with a huge lead and lost.

people who bandy about polling data that obama matches 5 points better against mccain in february and simply blowing smoke.

obama's negatives are going to be driven up; the race is going to tighten; and the more that obama supporters react with indignation that anyone might criticize the most perfectest candidate ever, the likelier it is that obama is going to fall back.

none of this makes clinton a likelier winner in november; i have no idea who is a likelier winner in november. but sheesh, should it take mark penn to point out this most obvious fact?

Mark Penn is pissing into the wind. He's already wet and smelly. But he needs to convince Hillary to keep spending money. After all, who do you think gets paid the most to run her pathetic campaign? Did I hear Mark Penn?!!!!

I don't think anyone is taking Obama's lead over McCain for granted. It's a long way to November.

With that said, how can any Clinton surrogate possibly make the argument with a straight face that she is the better candidate against McCain? She's actually behind McCain right now and her negatives are much, much higher. Conservatives are begging for her to be the nominee. Doesn't that tell them something?

i swear: obama supporters are going to make me support clinton after all.

I'm hearing similar things said in postings all over by both HRC and BO supporters about the other: I'm going to vote for X because Y's supporters make me gag. If there's a more asinine basis on which to vote, I don't know what it is.

Moreover, it's one thing to object to relatively close national head-to-head polls as being indicative of something. But comparison of, say, Hillary and Obama dry runs against McCain in particular states (especially borderline states) like Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan (where the Dems didn't even campaign!) is quite illuminating when the gap between HRC and BO is, as it is, over ten points. Yes, his negatives will get higher. But we don't know how much. And his positives may as well.

OK, sure, general election polls in February are a long way from definitive evidence of what's going to happen in November. It's a mistake to talk up Obama's prospects against McCain too far. OTOH it's not exactly clear how you get from there to the idea that Obama's a worse candidate than the primary opponent he's been consistently beating like a rented mule.

I don't like Penn either. But he never said Obama is like Kerry. Penn used Kerry as evidence for the proposition that winning Democratic primaries combined with polling showing a lead over the Republican opponent is not necessarily proof that you are the best candidate to win the election.

A more effective rebuke of Penn would be to point out that he wasn't trotting that argument out eight weeks ago when Hillary seemed poised to win the early primaries and did better head-to-head against Republicans.

Absolutely, February polling data is not predictive of November voting. But I don't think anyone can argue that doing worse in February polls means you'll do better in November.

What SDinIA said
By Penn's logic Clinton could lose by even a bigger margin than loses now.
Now that is inspriring.

who cares what mark penn has to say about barrack obama?

what is penn doing?

How come he is speaking publically?

what is he trying to do making the clinton campaign argument?

he is being paid to be a strategist

is this his new strategy

vote for hilary because mark penn has objections to barrack obamma as a presidential candidate

As usual, Penn is full of shit. Kerry was never 17 points up on Bush at any time. What a freaking liar. It's good to see these people going down in flames and thank God for it. HRC had no shot in the fall, and now, we won't face that prospect.

1) Why would any rational, well-informed, honest person care what Mark Penn says about anything. Everything that comes out of his mouth is pure spin (as that is his job)- but most of which is both dishonest and disingenuous.

2) Penn has once again created a convenient strawman here (which, Dana, I think you've bought into a little bit) that people take Obama's small lead on McCain for granted. I don't know anybody who takes these leads for granted.

What people HAVE pointed out are the different ways in which Obama and Clinton match-up with McCain. In these polls Obama has done well against McCain because of his (current) strength among Independents voters. Obama has repeatedly performed better than Clinton among this group of voters, which is why some believe he has a better chance against McCain in the general. Could this change? Sure. But it is a legitimate point for people to consider.

3) There were polls conducted earlier in the primary season which showed Clinton beating many of the (then) GOP candidates, which at that time her campaign believed was significant enough to highlight for reporters. But now, because she is not matching up as well against the presumptive GOP candidate, these types of polls are meaningless (kind of like all of the States/primaries she has lost over the past couple of weeks).

I'm for Obama, but I agree that you can't make too much of the head-to-head polls at this point.

First, they're comparing post-convention bump polls to February, which is ludicrous.

Second, I don't see how saying that the GOP can possibly slime Barack Obama so much that his negatives might dip, oh I don't know, down to where Hillary's already are is somehow supposed to redound to her benefit.

I am voting Obama because I think that HRC is to similar to McCain in her appeal to moderate conservatives, and also that she would energize the right-wing base to come out and vote against her when they might not come out to vote for McCain.

Yes, these polls are from Feb., so yes Obama can come down. But, um, why wouldn't you want to begin from the stronger position that the one offered by Hillary (the one suck McCain fumes in the polls)?

A cousin gave me Mark Penn's book for Christmas; with such excellent political arguments on display I think I can safely put it in the "to read, but really never will" pile.

Second, I don't see how saying that the GOP can possibly slime Barack Obama so much that his negatives might dip, oh I don't know, down to where Hillary's already are is somehow supposed to redound to her benefit.

Bingo. I've seen this referenced on TalkingPointsMemo, but some of these Clinton arguments essentially boil down to "yeah, but he's no better than us!"

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/178957.php

But like the flip-flop line of attack Hillary is pressing on Obama's public financing pledge, the attack speaks to her campaign's effort to undermine the very thing that has been the centerpiece of Obama's candidacy: his authenticity.

Sure he gives better speeches than I do, the Hillary line goes, but the words aren't even his own. He may talk a good game about public financing, she asserts, but when push comes to shove his position is the same as mine.

The attacks are intended to bring down Obama's positives, to knock him off his pedestal. But it's hard to see how they raise Hillary's. Her argument, boiled down, is: "He's no better than me." (Or perhaps, less charitably, "He's just as bad as me.")

Judged as political rhetoric, it strikes me as equally ineffective as her earlier charge that Obama was "raising false hopes."

This goes well alongside the statements about Hillary being like Lieberman we recently heard from the campaign.

I can't believe she is paying for this advice. I couldn't be paid to take it!

gee, as it happens, i was making a rhetorical gesture, not a statement of fact. i'm oppposed to dynastic succession, so i've always preferred edwards and obama to clinton, but i'm going to vote enthusiastically for whomever emerges.

that said, if you don't think the opinions of someone's supporters make any difference, you're being naive....

"When Kerry got the nomination he was 17 points up, ahead of Bush"

Penn is really just making this stuff up as he goes along, isnt he?

I mean, sure, individual polls can be all over the place, its in the nature of the beast - what, with a bewildering variety of methodologies, likely voter screens and margins of error. So who knows, there may have been one poll out that had Kerry up by 17, though I doubt it. But I did maintain an excel sheet back then in which I calculated a weekly average of the polls that came out. And there was not a week, not one, between February and November 2004 that Kerry's average lead was even just four percent - let alone 17. (Here's an example of a graph I based on that data then.)

Commenter Howard repeats the mistake, writing: "it is a simple fact that kerry came out of the convention with a huge lead and lost". This is just not true. I dont know where people get this memory from that Kerry was comfortably leading in the polls in '04. Kerry did not have a huge lead coming out of the Convention, in fact he had just the barest of leads. Up about 2% on average in the ten polls that came out at the time.

Dont you remember all the discussion at the time, when the Dem convention failed to lift his numbers at all, about how this just was because the people were so polarised, everybody had already made up their mind? Except that when the Republican Convention came up next, Bush made big gains in the polls (seven points on average in two weeks), retaking the lead?

Of course Mark Penn cant possibly be mistaken, he knows this stuff like his back pocket. Ergo, he's just making stuff up now.

Lay off Mark Penn. He meant the Duke, not Kerry.

Google "Dukakis led by 17 points" and you'll see how Penn got confused.

He is probably exhausted by Obama dragging out the primary process for so long in his quixotic effort to bring hope to all by disenfranchising Michigan.

Time to get real, America. Clinton is to be the nominee.

Is this a fight Obamaniacs want to have? "Oh, our guy doesn't draw comparisons to Kerry, he's actually more like Dukakis!"

Obama is a "much, much more attractive politician than Kerry"?

(eye roll)

Take a deep breath Dana! Kerry was hero, a 20-year record of Senate accomplishments, and cleaned up in the debate format. Obama says pretty things. They do have one thing in common -- they cannot play hardball -- unlike Hillary.

Just because Mark Penn says something, doesn't mean it's wrong.

nimh, there's always a risk that one's memory is fallible, so i went back to real clear politics (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/bush_vs_kerry_hth.html).

in the immediate aftermath of the convention, kerry moved from roughly a +1 or +2 position coming in to a +6 to +8; he was still at +5 a couple of weeks later.

in the context of bush's popularity in the summer of 2004, +6 to +8 still strikes me as a "huge" lead, but perhaps i overstated and should have said "meaningful."

Typo!

Meant to say, "Kerry was a war hero."