The Clinton Strategist

If there's one person in the Clinton campaign who can probably be blamed more than Bill for the failure of the inevitible candidate to win it would be Mark Penn, the campaign strategist. This is the same guy who once stated that 25% of Republican women would defect and vote for Hillary just because she's a woman. Smart guy.

Time Magazine tells us that Penn wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier:

Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game. That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?" And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories.

Some strategist. Obama definitely outorganized Clinton, and it probably wasn't that hard given Penn's work.