Mark Penn Cost Hillary the Nomination

Not just by being a double-dealing hack. He also Toverrode the best advice Hillary got about Iraq. The former chief pollster and lead strategist for the campaign explains:

the rest of the campaign didn't want to tackle Iraq. They always felt that that was a losing proposition for her, and they always pulled it back.

....Why do you think the rest of the team was afraid to go after him?
I think they thought that her position on Iraq wasn't strong enough to sustain a debate on Iraq.

Or popular enough.
Right. But her position, remember — we went through the early discussion of "Was it a mistake? Should she apologize?" Of course, the rest of the team wanted her to apologize. [laughs] And you know, she weathered that extremely well. She didn't apologize, because she had given a speech outlining her position. On that day. And that speech held up. It actually explained why she voted for Iraq and why it was a sincere vote at the time.

Frankly, Iraq is the reason Hillary was never on my list of acceptable nominees. Not to say that I wouldn't have voted for her in the general election, but I would've voted for anyone else in the primary campaign, and I'm not alone in that judgment. Voting to invade Iraq was the biggest mistake she made, matched only by her vote for Joe Lieberman's "Bomb Iran" amendment. Her unwillingness to recognize and acknowledge that she really and truly screwed up in 2002 told me that she would make the same dumb mistake again, and it would have fatally crippled her ability to tie McCain to the war. Either she believed Bush's claim that Iraq was the next front in the war on terror, or she believed Bush when he said that the invasion resolution would just be used to threaten Iraq, or she was too afraid of looking weak on national security to stand up for what she knew to be right. None of those stances qualify someone to be President. The first wouldn't be so bad, since so many people got caught up in it, but then she shouldn't have been afraid to apologize for the vote. That she listened to Penn's advice and refused to apologize closed off her easiest out.

There were other screwups after that, and Mark Penn's fingers were all over those, as well. Here's hoping that Mark Penn never works in Democratic politics again. Let's also hope that we get a few more Democratic politicians who are smart enough to recognize that sort of bad advice, and to reject both the message and the messenger.