Good investigative article on key H. Clinton advisor

Anne Kornblut had a good piece of reporting in today’s WaPo about a guy called Mark Penn, described as the “chief strategist” for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
If you were looking for a good reason to distrust Hillary, her close present relationship with this guy seems to provide a number of them.
Penn belongs to a growing breed of types in this country who try to make a very handsome living out of providing purely “technical” campaign-related advice to candidates. Of course, there is seldom such a thing as completely unslanted, purely data-driven advice, though people in that job frequently like to claim that there is. (What “data” do you collect, anyway? And crucially, in opinion polls, how do you frame the questions that get you the data you’re using?)
But here are two things Kornblut tells us about Mark Penn that I didn’t know before. Firstly, this:

Penn gained his foreign policy expertise working on numerous campaigns overseas, especially in Israel. In 1981, he and business partner Doug Schoen helped reelect Menachem Begin, one of the most right-wing prime ministers in the country’s history, and emerged with a new outlook on the Middle East. “We got a chance to experience firsthand the perils and possibilities that the state of Israel presents,” Schoen said in an interview.
In a pivotal moment, the pollsters watched as Begin launched airstrikes against a developing Iraqi nuclear facility, Osirak, in the middle of the campaign. “In the end, bombing the Osirak reactor became a metaphor for the type of man that Begin was and the steps he was willing to take to safeguard Israel’s security,” Schoen wrote in his autobiography, “The Power of the Vote.”
Ever since, Penn has been a prominent advocate of conveying strength in foreign policy. As recently as the 2004 presidential contest, Penn argued that Democrats would lose if they failed to close the “security gap.” His client list includes prominent backers of the Iraq war, particularly Lieberman, whose presidential campaign Penn helped run in 2004, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose campaign he advised when Blair won a historic third term in 2005…

And then, there’s the fact that, in his role as Chief Executive of the big “public relations” (i.e., influence-peddling) firm of Burson-Marsteller, Penn is continuing– while also acting as Clinton’s chief campaign strategist– to lead BM’s work on the big contract it has for Microsoft.
Kornblut points out that the organizational ethics of this arrangement are even worse than those under which President Bush worked with his key political strategist, Karl Rove, during the 2000 campaign.
She notes that in 2000,

then-Gov. George W. Bush forced his top strategist, Karl Rove, to sell his direct-mail business to eliminate the perception of any conflicts of interest and to guarantee that his full attention would be on the campaign. While other consultants also do lucrative corporate work, no one holds as senior a corporate position as Penn’s while effectively running a presidential campaign.

Kornblut writes about Penn:

Although he is Clinton’s chief strategist, he is not technically on the campaign staff. Instead, the Clinton campaign employs his polling firm, Penn Schoen & Berland Associates, a 175-employee unit within Burson-Marsteller. Penn’s firm is on a retainer of $15,000 to $20,000 per month, with specific services, such as polls or direct mailings, available a la carte.
According to recent Federal Election Commission filings, the Clinton campaign owes Penn Schoen & Berland $277,146.96 for consulting and polling in the first quarter of 2007. Penn’s wife’s firm, Nancy Jacobson Consulting Inc., was paid $10,000 in the first quarter and is owed an additional $19,354.84. Penn said that he receives no compensation directly from the Clinton campaign and that his salary from Burson-Marsteller, which he declined to reveal, is contingent upon his management performance for the corporation overall, rather on than specific fees from the campaign.
Penn said that he has been cleared of all client responsibilities, except for Microsoft, for the duration of the campaign but that he still relies on a team of about 20 employees to do most of the day-to-day work. Though running a major company and a presidential campaign at the same time would seem to provide a number of possible conflicts, Penn insists there are none.

Well, Penn might claim there are no conflicts of interest. But what does Hillary Clinton’s continuing relationship with a guy in this position tell us about her priorities and values? That they are even sleazier than George W. Bush’s? That’s certainly what it looks like from this article.