Good Riddance to Mark Penn

Howard Fineman blasts Hillary Clinton for hiring Mark Penn to run her campaign. It's a very good piece, but I wonder, why is he writing this now, after Penn quit, and not when her campaign first started?

At a time when voters clearly wanted change—big change—in Washington and in politics, Hillary chose as her "chief strategist" a multimillionaire corporate consultant who was the epitome of the D.C. lobbying and PR game of the Clinton and Bush II years. ...

Like many students of politics, Penn was oblivious to his own political profile. And again, it must be said, Clinton was equally blind—or arrogant—about what Penn's preeminence would signal. How else do you explain the decision to let him remain as Washington boss of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world's largest PR and lobbying firms, while, in effect, running the campaign? What planet were they on?

Answer: Planet Washington. Only among insiders in Washington would this kind of arrangement be considered even vaguely acceptable. The firm's list of clients—including the notorious Blackwater security company and the government of Colombia—was almost comically "off-message" for a Democratic campaign.

The acid tone permeated the campaign—but, again, that was Clinton's fault. She is the one who set up an unstable and untenable organization chart. It had a literally part-time Penn at its apex and everybody around him in what eventually became a circular firing squad.