Hopefully now someone with actual knowledge can take control. Carville anybody? Begalla? Hell, I'd take anyone at this moment over Penn. Hillary's chance's although still slim, just went up with Penn not there to screw every thing up. Hillary can finally now be...Hillary.
4 comments :
OOPS!!! He's still there. It seems he was demoted in name only. He's still as active as before.
HRC Colombia ties don't stop with Penn
By EAMON JAVERS
4/8/08 6:43 AM EST
Mark Penn isn’t the only Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter on the wrong side of the Colombia trade agreement.
The Democratic-leaning advocacy firm the Glover Park Group, former home to Clinton campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson, signed a $40,000 per month contract with the government of Colombia in April of 2007 to promote the very agreement that Clinton now rails against on the presidential campaign trail.
That means Glover Park Group was arguing the same position as Penn's firm. The contentious Clinton strategist and Burson-Marsteller chief executive lost his campaign job over the weekend after The Wall Street Journal revealed that he’d met with Colombian officials to plot strategy on the pact.
Several other Glover Park employees have deep connections with the Clintons, including founding partner Joe Lockhart, who served as the White House press secretary under President Bill Clinton, and Joel Johnson, who was a senior communications adviser in the Clinton White House.
Six employees of Glover Park Group contributed a total of nearly $20,000 to Clinton’s campaign in 2007, according to data kept by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Wolfson, who is set to take over many responsibilities from the departing Penn, resigned from Glover Park last year to avoid conflicts of interest but retains an equity interest in the firm.
The tangled web of connections on the trade issue inside the Clinton camp illustrates the thin line in Washington between private and political advocacy.
PERSONAL NOTE: I'm not hating on Hillary. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of her railing against free trade pacts while loading her staff with lobbyists who are actively seeking such trade pacts!!
April 08, 2008
Bill Clinton backed Colombia trade deal: 'Estoy a favor'
A reader in Latin America turned up a June 23, 2005 article from the news portal Terra (reprinted (.doc) by the Bogota government) that quotes Bill Clinton offering unambiguous support for the free trade agreement with Colombia.
The article is in Spanish, so what follows is a translation of a translation, but the gist is unmistakable:
"We need your help to expedite the signing of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU is very important to give a clear signal of what the relations between the two countries should be," President Alvaro Uribe said yesterday to the former president of the EU Bill Clinton, during Expogestion 2005.
"I will raise your point when you return to the United States," Clinton replied. "I am in favor of the free trade agreement and it is my hope that we will find the right formula to reach the agreement."
The story also reports that Clinton received a two-minute standing ovation after "applauding Colombia's perserverence for the progress made in the Free Trade Agreement negotiations with the United States."
There is, of course, a little wiggle room here, and the question of what's the right formula. In any case, it will be hard to demote Bill Clinton from his role as chief strategist.
Spanish after the jump.
Here's the applause, then the exchange, in Spanish:
Clinton elogió la labor del gobierno colombiano en su lucha contra la pobreza y contra el narcotráfico y aplaudió su perseverancia por los avances logrados en las negociaciones de un Tratado de Libre Comercio con los Estados Unidos (TLC).
Esos elogios motivaron los aplausos del público que por más de dos minutos hacían sonar fuetemente las palmas de sus manos, cada vez con mayor intensidad.
“Necesitamos su ayuda para agilizar la firma del Tratado de Libre Comercio (TLC) con E.U. Es de gran importancia para dar una señal clara de lo que deben ser las relaciones entre los dos países”, le dijo ayer el presidente Álvaro Uribe, al ex presidente de los E.U. Bill Clinton, durante Expogestion 2005.
“Voy a plantear su punto cuando regrese a E.U.”, le respondió Clinton. “Estoy a favor del TLC y tengo la esperanza de que vamos a encontrar la fórmula para que se logre el acuerdo”, añadió.
Meet the Clinton Campaign's New Boss. Worse than the Old Boss
By admin | April 7, 2008
The Clinton campaign sort-a-kinda fired its chief political strategist, Mark Penn, for double dealing on trade policy. He'll still be advising and polling for the campaign, which is pretty much what he was doing before he was forced to walk the plank … in a truly slick Clintonian non-plank-walking way. Penn's replacement, Geoff Garin, it seems isn't much better. Matter of fact, when it comes to supporting bad trade policy, Garin maybe worse than Penn. At least he certainly has less respect for the American worker and the American people.
Consider his commentary with regard to the North American Free Trade Agreement, a hot-button issue on the 2008 campaign trail.Back in 1993, when the Clinton administration was gearing up to promote the pact, Garin told The New York Times that Bill Clinton could close the deal by playing on the ignorance of Americans regarding trade policy in general and NAFTA in particular. …
As the congressional votes on NAFTA drew closer, Garin shifted to a new argument.
Opponents of the deal driven by fear and emotion, he told the Times. "They feel their livelihoods are at stake."
Backers of the agreement were more thoughtful. "The supporters tend to deal with NAFTA on a more intellectual level," the pollster explained.
As it turned out, Garin was onto something — as least as far as the Clintons were concerned — when he talked about playing on ignorance as the best strategy for promoting NAFTA. Bill and Hillary Clinton certainly did that back in 1993, when they aggressively lobbied for NAFTA by peddling a package of lies that seemed absurd at the time and only seem more absurd today.
But Garin was wrong about who was dealing with trade policy on an intellectual level.
It turns out that the critics of NAFTA in the labor, farm, environmental and human rights movements — who said the deal would harm U.S. industries, depress wages in the U.S. and Mexico, undermine Mexico's farm economy thus spurring immigration and encourage an economic race to the bottom that would eventually see both the U.S. and Mexico losing jobs to China and other Asian countries – were the ones dealing with the issue on an intellectual level.
They were so intellectual, in fact, that they got just about everything right. … The Nation
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