The Penn Central

Editorial of The New York Sun
April 7, 2008

The decision by the Clinton campaign to demote its chief strategist, Mark Penn, after a flap concerning Mr. Penn's advice to the government of Colombia has to be one of the lamest reasons in the history of presidential politics for the demotion of a campaign aide.

What Mr. Penn reportedly did — meet with Colombia's ambassador about the Colombia Free Trade Agreement — doesn't come close to warranting being fired as chief strategist. If Mrs. Clinton is such a committed protectionist, following the logic of losing Mr. Penn, she'd have to get rid of her husband, who championed, and signed into law, the North American Free Trade Agreement that was a predecessor to the Columbia pact.

Or if it's not the trade that is the issue but the mere appearance of being on the payroll, or giving advice to, a foreign entity, she'd also have to fire Mr. Clinton. Some of the $109 million the Clintons earned in the last seven years, after all, came from speeches he gave to foreign groups.

If the Columbia trade pact is the sticking point, one of the two men announced as Mr. Penn's replacement as chief strategist, Howard Wolfson, isn't exactly immaculate, either. He's been a partner in the Glover Park Group, which, according to the Department of Justice's Foreign Agents Registration Act Web site, is a $40,000-a-month registered agent of the Colombian government, with an assignment to "propose to the Colombian government a comprehensive government relations strategy to reach out for broader support for the approval" of the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement in Congress.

A contract between Glover Park Group and the Colombian government spoke of the American firm "working closely with Colombian Government teams in Washington DC and in Colombia." Mr. Wolfson himself was not registered as a foreign agent and there is no indication he worked on the Colombia account.

Mrs. Clinton is running around the country accusing President Bush of having ruined America's relations with our allies around the world. What are the people of Colombia to think, though, of an American politician who forces her aide to apologize and step down for the supposed sin of meeting with their ambassador to discuss improving trade relations between our countries? It is an insult.

Mr. Wolfson's new co-chief strategist, Geoffrey Garin, is a longtime pollster for the AFL-CIO, which opposed NAFTA and just about every other trade agreement ever signed. His other clients, according to his firm's Web site, have included the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, the United Nations Foundation, and the American Federation of Teachers.

If Mrs. Clinton or other campaign aides wanted to get rid of Mr. Penn because he is abrasive or because his strategy hasn't led to a victory, they could have gone ahead and done that. To us, it had looked as if her campaign had been starting to turn the corner, with respected analysts such as Michael Barone recently predicting that she could end up with a victory in the popular vote among Democratic primary and caucus-goers on the basis of her appeal to Jacksonian voters.

But sacrificing Mr. Penn on the altar of opposition to free trade is a campaign stunt that is going to be interpreted in the global economy as a sign of desperation. It is an abandonment of the principle for which her husband and his vice president, Al Gore, stood in the face of an opposition, in Ross Perot and Ralph Nader, that had been left on the far edges of the American political debate. If Mr. Penn had to go, Mrs. Clinton would have done her campaign and the American economy a service by pinning it on someone other than the Colombians.