[NYTr] The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Oct 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10202007.html

excerpted from CounterPunch Diary

The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The pollster and immensely influential tactical adviser at Hillary
Clinton's elbow is Mark Penn. Penn's polling played a crucial role in
Bill Clinton's recovery from the nadir of 1994, when he joined Team
Clinton as part of the rescue party summoned by Hillary Clinton and
headed by Dick Morris. Penn has been joined at the hip politically to
Mrs Clinton ever since, as a prime adviser of her successful senate bid
and now in her drive to capture the Democratic presidential nomination.

To find out what Penn and hence Mrs Clinton deems worthy of note about
the state of he naion we can now turn to Penn's new book, Microtrends.*

Penn's America is a bright-eyed, mostly upbeat world. As he bowls
along, Penn tosses market-researched stats and polling data like
confetti and soon the reader is spattered with golly-gee
micro-measurements: growing number of home knitters ("knitting is very
hip"), decline of baseball fans, burgeoning vegan children, rise of
women archers, longer best-selling books, more college-educated
nannies, a surge in employees in the non-profit sector, more kids who
are cross-dressers and who, Penn says brightly, "are triggering a
large, new tolerance movement in schools and communities."

There are no Columbines in Mr Penn's index, no Goths intolerantly
spraying the schoolyard with machine-gun fire. Why look on the dark
side when Penn's researchers excavate the news that there are more
left-handers, hence - Penn boldly claims--the probability of more da
Vincis. Now that's a microtrend worth savoring! The factoid lies on the
page, awaiting an entrepreneur and a business plan. Will some niche
'trep (teen entrepreneur--a microtrend) change the zipper seam on guys'
pants, so lefties can unzip with their left hands. Will guys wear
pants? Will there be any guys? Yes, says Penn, the long-term trend is
towards more guys, hence more gays.

"Part of the reason I love this work," burbles Penn about his polling,
"is that every day I find out some new aspiration, hope or concern
people have, and I get to help my clients shape their products and
messages based on these findings." What Penn never finds are the
collective aspirations of groups of people who find the American
corporate system intolerably unjust. Union people don't figure in his
focus groups--at least as real workers as opposed to pasteboard
constructs as such Soccer Moms or Nascar Dads. The people who find it
easiest to contact Penn to communicate their aspirations, hopes and
concerns are the people who can afford to meet his hefty bills, meaning
the rich and the powerful, starting with Bill Gates and heading on
through Silvio Berlusconi, the nuclear industry, Monsanto and other
clients in need of image refreshment.

Penn also the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, (part of the British-based WPP
Group), a pr firm that in the course of its career has been retained to
winch some sensationally grimy clients out of the mud, such Union
Carbide after Bhopal, the Argentine military junta and Royal Dutch
Shell after some very poor publicity in Nigeria.

"We live in a world with a deluge of choices" Penn exults, in a typical
paean to modern times. "In some sense it's the triumph of the Starbucks
economy over the Ford economy.. Starbucks is governed by the idea that
people make choices--in their coffee, their milk, their sweetener" It's
the way Bill Clinton used to burble on, using research briefs and polls
concocted by Penn and Morris to persuade Americans that with Bill at
the helm the nation would be on the cutting edge of innovative thinking
and performance.

Actually, in terms of their respective products Fordism offered a lot
more choices than Starbucks. In the mid-1950s, the options available to
the purchaser of a Chevy Bel-Air 4-door sedan were infinite, from a
rainbow of paint and fabric combinations including a paisley-pattern
roof. The shapes and styles of the cars were prodigious in baroque
variety. And the cars were often cheap. As for Starbucks, the company's
basic signature is over-roasted beans and its core achievement is to
have people fork over $3.50 for a cup of coffee. Starbucks is a
predatory franchiser and its arrival in any town usually heralds the
extinction of existing small cafes and diners. Its signage , across
America and around the world through 13000 outlets, advertises not
Penn's "customized, personalized products" but unending repetition.

The trick of Microtrends is to offer an America shaped to match the
sort of "non-divisive" political rhetoric favored by the Democratic
Leadership Council, an outfit paid for by corporations and designed to
purge the Democratic Party of any partiality to the cause of labor or
the interests of the poor. The Clintons have always been the DLC's
marquee attraction, and its outlook is Pnn's. In the tapestry of
Microtrends the spotlight is not on an awful health system with over 40
million uninsured, but on DIYDs, Do-It-Yourself Doctors. Penn tells us
"it's the biggest trend in American health care", spearheaded by women
and the young and promoted by Penn and Burson-Marsteller, working
diligently for the pharmaceutical companies whose products, freed from
the trifling restraints of a doctor's prescription, will be at the
disposal of the DIYDs in the chain stores. Thus do microtrends find
their due place in the great scheme of things.

* Microtrends, The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes. By Mark
J. Penn with E.Kinney Zalesne. Twelve Books. 426 pp. 

[...]