What is "immediately"? Doesn't he already have a similar McCain-as-substanceless-media-darling ad running? How many minutes have to pass before Obama is a labeled a passive, Kerry clone?

Mark Penn advising Team Obama on how to run an effective campaign is like Kobe Bryant advising the Boston Celtics on the proper team cohesion needed to win a title.

Geez, I guess I have to admire his utter shamelessness, but why won't he shut up already?

Mark Penn. who was celebrating in a meeting before a vote was cast. Then, he was told California was not a winner-take-all primary. But he recovered and continued to milk the campaign for millions, during which time his true genius was revealed. That would be his genius for making big money while doing too little, doing it too late and then being paid while doing nothing. Perhaps he's haunted by the money he didn't earn and feels he needs to bring Obama down.

Of course Obama may be too slow in defending but Penn has more experience and he's still defending. He wrote, "Picking a president is not just about the candidates’ strengths but also about how their weaknesses can manifest themselves." Yeah, and the same is true in picking a campaign adviser. At least part of his resume will be legit. He has a strong work ethic even after he was fired: Critical of Barack while defending his lost cause.

"The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime."

Babe Ruth

Why would anyone listen to that pig?

Yes, indeed, it makes so much sense to take advice from somebody who took the unbeatable candidate and helped her lose.  Good work, Penn.  Foolish knave.

Blackie, I usually try to take the high road, but if I had to compare Penn to an animal, pig would be my choice.  Good call.  I once saw a picture of him eating a doughnut and  thought of the swine right away.  

Let's be on the alert with Penn.  If ANY of his predictions come true re:Obama, the Democratic party will have its own Rove.  Ugh!!!!

Guys, I hate Penn as much as the next responsible democrat but he has a point.  The Obama Campaign has been relatively slow to counter attack directly.  I think they do this on purpose, sacrificing time to "get the message right."  However, they should keep in mind that there is nothing better than the "zero response" they gave McCain when he "informed" Obama that there is Al Qaeda in Iraq - that was classic!

Do they need a "war room?"  Maybe they do.  Should it become an all-consuming obsession like it was with Penn and the Clintons?  Clearly not.

Slow on the draw? Which of the two- Penn or Obama- was aware of the late-breaking fact that California allocates its delegates proportionally?

And Gavriel, I believe that Obama already has a war room. As some in the media have noted, he's had almost immediate responses to most of the webads with ads of their own.

See the almost immediate response to McCain's maverick ads with the "it's not the John McCain I know" ads.

Oy.

Obama's team has their plan. It doesn't include getting into tit for tat in July/August and diminishing his brand. I'm guessing they'll take these (MINOR) blows now, preserve his positive image through the summer (while McCain decimates his own image as a good guy) and then hit McCain squarely on policy in the Fall. It's still an easy path to victory....

Will anyone remember this Paris Hilton nonsense in a month? No.

I don't understand why anybody still takes this guy seriously enough to publish his analysis.  If there's a level of demonstrated incompetence that would lead you to start ignoring someone, I'm not sure how he hasn't reached it.

Of course, the fact that an argument comes from Mark Penn does not necessarily mean that it's wrong.  His point roughly correct: negative ads can be effective, and he's correct when he says that "done fairly, they serve a legitimate role."

All of this strikes me as entirely uncontroversial stuff.  The essence of a political campaign's air war is to convince people that you are a better choice than your opponent(s).  Nobody objects to negative ads that are "done fairly."  I think questions about negative advertising often miss this point.   It's only a subset of negative advertising that people object to.

The relevant question isn't about saying negative things, it's about saying petty, misleading, or otherwise objectionable things.  From the observation that swift-boating works, does it follow that swift-boating is a good way to run a campaign?  The criticism of sleazy campaigning isn't that it's ineffective, it's that it's morally objectionable.  So Penn is basically offering an answer to a question that nobody was asking.  It's sort of like writing an article entitled "Sweat shops: They really do work" about how you really can make more money using child laborers who work for next to nothing.

Obama ridiculed the McCain "celebrity" ad almost immediately, asking dryly "Is that the best they can come up?" It made the McCain campaign look silly, petty and incompetent without getting into a tit for tat.

(And just FYI, if Penn is such smart, strategic guy, how come he's still owed over five million bucks?)

because that's why Hillary lost - not negative enough.

Re Penn: just because he's an asshole, that doesn't make him wrong.  

The Obama response ad was weak.  Never play the other fella's game.  He essentially accepted the frame set forth by McCain (celebrity) instead of pushing a new meme.  Do not allow this election to be a referendum on Obama... make it about Bush dammit.  

The Obama campaign has the ability to drive narratives (i.e., get lazy reporters to ask questions) to either connect or separate Bush and McCain...  What are they waiting for?

Mi - according to the article below, there is no War Room as such in the literal sense of an actual room with a bunch of monitors that monitor the opponents activities/ads/press coverage in real time on multiple networks, etc. Obviously they do monitor such things, but not in a "War Room."  I was just suggesting that maybe they should have one. www.cbsnews.com/.../main4317674.shtml

As for the "It's not the John McCain I Know" ad, I must confess I haven't seen it.  Are you referring to the DNC's Maverick No More ad?  Please post a link and I'll be happy to have a look.  

I was referring more to McCain's celebrity attack ads which were responded to a day or two later with counter-attacks against McCain, but the "Celebrity" attack itself was not addressed immediately by the Obama campaign.  Thankfully, Paris Hilton took  the bull by the horns herself which gave Obama the best of both worlds.  But Rapid Response it wasn't.

VC - Overall I think you are correct, but McCain's only path to victory involves these sorts of "day in day out" chipping away attacks in the hopes that something will stick and turn into a wedge.  Believe me, they're saving their big guns for later, so getting good at rapid response now can't be a bad thing, even if it's really only a secondary goal to "getting the right message out there."  

It's harder to get your message out when they keep attacking day in day out without relenting.  Sometimes you have to shut these people up so that a brief moment of silence becomes available to get your message out.

This is what Hillary Clinton did too - spam the airwaves with attacks so that the newcomer can't get his message out and people naturally gravitate towards the incumbent.  And if one of the attacks sticks , or the candidate gaffes, all the better!  It didn't work for her because in caucuses "spamming the airwaves with attacks" is less effective than grassroots mobilization, in fact it tends to hurt the attacker much more by further mobilizing the defenders base.

Not so in the National Election.  Republican/Rovian Knife Fight politics (playing the "he played the race card" card for example) is what they are gearing up for - to poke wholes in Obama's messages and image quicker than he can plug them and thereby keep the election "all about Barack" and hope that fear+uncertainty+racial tensions and/or latent racism does the trick.

It's there only path, we know they are going to do it, we know they have a sympathetic administration with a few dirty tricks up their sleeves, and we know that in the final 72 hours the 527's will mount an all-out offensive, even as John McCain politely "asks them" to stop the negative campaigning on his behalf.  We know this.

Why not improve our Rapid Response capabilities so that we're better able to meet the challenge head on?  Penn's overall political strategy and management ability has been proven a failure in Hillary's campaign, but I think he's right about this one point.  It's important and we should take it to heart.  In the final 72 hours THERE WON"T BE TIME for the kind of big picture strategy planning to counter attacks (i.e. a trip abroad to shore up foreign affairs credentials, waiting for a debate to make a point, etc.)  

It's going to be ad-hoc triage in a media-fed noise war the likes of which we have never seen and Rapid Response will play an important tactical role in determining who emerges victorious.  Why not give it it's due?

What I don't think many people realize is that McCain has been essentially advertising online, or sending web ads to media outlet as a way of getting free coverage, but don't believe the hype that Obama is not doing his own counter advertising. While McCain is advertising on cable news shows, Obama's campaign has been targeting states and particular cities at the state and local level.  They have been systematically releasing pro-obama ads taylor-made to specific issues that pertain to the states that they are targeting.  Unlike McCain, the Obama campaign has not really been releasing it's "negative" ads to the national press.  The negative ads are targeted to specific issue for specific state, i.e. DHL/McCain/RickDavis/8000jobs lost, or Wiscosin/Harley/anti-trade.  So while McCain's national numbers may be holding steady, if you look underneath at the state polls, Obama is doing better than you would expect a Democrat to do in some really Red States (I think 1 of the latest polls have Obama +5 in ALASKA).

Basically, remember what the Obama campaign did during the primaries, unlike Clinton, Obama learned the lessons of 2000/2004, you don't win the presidency by the popular vote, you win by electoral college, or state by state. I read an article somewhere that even a small lead in the national head to head, can translate into a landslide in the electoral college.

Gavriel, yes I was speaking of the maverick no more.

It's envy. Penn  is not happy sitting out this presidential election, having lost to people he considers below par.  I shudder just thinking of what would've been a vile match-up of Penn vs Steve Schmidt. A sleazefest for the ages. Yuck.