He still counts

This isn’t the first time Mark Penn has been shown the door by a presidential candidate, and it may not be the last.

Before the pollster embarrassed his boss, Hillary Clinton, by telling Colombia how to lobby for a trade pact that Clinton opposes, Penn angered 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore by flippantly dismissing the idea of “Clinton fatigue,” not to mention promising Gore that Bill Bradley wasn’t a real threat and that George W. Bush’s support came from people mistaking him for his father.

But despite these missteps, Penn has left his mark on American politics. Whenever he’s not being characterized as rumpled and awkward, he’s being compared to Karl Rove. And it’s true -- what Rove did for the base, Penn did for the swing voter.

Working on the Bill Clinton campaign in 1996, initially as the underling of Dick Morris, Penn identified a group of newly mobilizing, mostly unaligned voters whom he dubbed “soccer moms.” Only a year after 65% of Americans vowed to never vote for Bill Clinton, Penn helped usher him into his second term with an overwhelming majority, campaigning on such small-bore issues as school uniforms and V-chips.

Penn’s work formed the basis for his widely acclaimed book, “Microtrends,” released last year. It’s a broad illustration of the principles he’s used to win political campaigns -- from Bill Clinton in 1996 to Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate race to Tony Blair’s 2005 reelection -- and big-time corporate clients.

Penn’s claim: There are far more than John Edwards’ two Americas; there are hundreds. “Microtrends” profiles 75 of them to demonstrate how as few as 1% of Americans -- whether they’re illegal immigrants or willing grapefruit dieters -- can create mass cultural change.

“Rarely are things what they seem on the surface, and non-quantitative, conventional wisdom is usually not wisdom at all,” he wrote. “Hidden right in front of us are powerful, counterintuitive trends that can be used to drive a new business, run a campaign, start a movement or guide your investment strategy.”

But Penn’s method hasn’t worked entirely this election season: Clinton’s focus on the nitty-gritty of policy, her refusal to apologize for the Iraq war, her knitting together of small interest groups, and Penn’s big-business connections are having a hard time against Barack Obama’s emphasis on vision, an antiwar stance, mass movement and small donors. For some Democrats, Penn is everything that’s wrong with the party establishment: centrist, monied, triangulated. But for better or worse, his style -- a focus on numbers and narrow slivers of the electorate -- seems to be sticking around.