Mark Penn, chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, quit Sunday.

The official reason: his meeting last Monday with the Colombian ambassador in Washington to discuss strategy to pass the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact that Sen. Clinton vehemently opposes.

Why was Penn meeting with the Colombians?

Because he’s always had another job as chief executive of Burson Marsteller Worldwide. Burson, you see, has a lucrative contract with the Colombian government to win congressional passage of the bilateral trade deal. Penn met with the Colombian government within hours of a Clinton speech to the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO in which she pledged to fight the trade deal in part because the Colombian government beats and intimidates union organizers.

Having your chief strategist plot strategy to pass a trade deal you oppose for reasons of economic and bedrock politics is, how should we say, awkward.

Penn bargained successfully for his job Friday, when the story first broke in The Wall Street Journal. He sent around apologetic e-mails to senior staff and apologized to Clinton by phone. The typically air-tight Clinton campaign was authorized to speak on background that Clinton and her senior staff were furious at Penn — a clear sign his days might be numbered.

Pressure built over the weekend as members of Congress with strong union ties and top union officials demanded swift action against Penn. Friends of Clinton had long disagreed with Penn’s strategy. Specifically, they questioned whether his obsessive tendency to slice and dice the electorate into microscopic sub-groups suitable for micro-targeted appeals was sufficient to compete against a full-fledged social movement in Barack Obama.

Those tensions had boiled under the surface for months and Clinton’s top delegate hunter, Harold Ickes, and her top ad consultant, Mandy Grunwald, had long been gunning for Penn. “Harold and Mandy must be very happy tonight,” a top Democratic source on Capitol Hill told The Bourbon Room on Sunday.

But Penn retained the unflinching loyalty of former President Bill Clinton, for whom he polled and offered strategic advice after Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. Hillary also favored Penn for his work on her first and second campaigns for the U.S. Senate.

So why dump Penn this close to Pennsylvania where so much — dare I say everything — rides on a Clinton victory?

The campaign won’t say anything more than the meeting with the Colombian government was viewed as an unpardonable act of poor judgment (it won’t say betrayal but other Democrats not affiliated with the campaign do). The deeper reason, according to several top Democrats close to the Clinton camp, is that Penn’s continuation with the campaign threatened to disrupt the flow of money and the status of Super Delegates already committed to Hillary or those with whom she is actively negotiating support.

Clinton can’t afford a slow-down in fundraising. She needs every penny she can raise for the primary and her ability in February and March to solicit funds for the general election may make for decent fundraising headlines, but it doesn’t pay the bills now. And paying the bills now is Clinton’s top priority. Why? Because campaigns don’t end when the candidate decides he/she has had enough (because he/she never has enough). Campaigns end when the candidate can’t pay to keep the lights on.

Clinton also can’t stand any superdelegate defections or to suddenly have dozens of supers on the “negotiation” line suddenly stop answering their phones or ignoring Hillary’s e-mails. Money and superdelegates were about to slip away from Hillary if she kept Penn.

His departure, by the way, was not cause for panic, concern, alarm, remorse, regret, sadness, nostalgia or nausea in Hillaryland. Indeed, those were the reactions to Penn’s continued presence.

“Penn will always be linked to one strategic approach and one strategic approach only for Hillary’s campaign,” said Tony Coelho, former campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000. “And that was inevitability.

Penn cast Hillary as inevitable and everything flowed from that. But inevitable became imperial and began to hurt her. And then as the inevitable one, she didn’t compete in caucuses because she wouldn’t need them. If she had competed in those caucuses she would have won some and finished strong in the rest and would be ahead in delegates now. But Penn was all about inevitability. That drove institutional money to Hillary but it also drove grassroots money to Obama.”

Chris Kofinis served as John Edwards’ communications director and said the Edwards camp never understood Clinton’s approach to the race as the candidate of inevitability.

“Who roots for the inevitable candidate,” Kofinis asked. “It’s like Saturday’s NCAA national semi-final. Everyone expected North Carolina to wipe the floor with Kansas. So who do people cheer for? Kansas.”

Kofinis said Clinton’s pitch as the inevitable candidate helped her consolidate her base but left little or no room to expand the base. “Inevitability isn’t a rationale to vote for someone.”

Clinton adopted other approaches and campaign pitches, of course. She keyed on experience and results-oriented solutions. She then cast herself as a fighter .

She’s now casting herself as the manager of the Democrats’ Buyer’s Remorse Emporium. All of these appeals to voters came after the bubble of inevitability burst.

“Where campaigns end has a lot to do with where they begin,” Coelho said. “That’s where this one began.”

Coelho said he believes Obama could win Pennsylvania. As I write that, Dick Bennett at American Research Group, has just released a poll in Pennyslvania that shows Clinton and Obama tied at 45 percent. ARG’s numbers have been shaky this year but this is the second poll since Wednesday to show the race tied. Several other polls have showed Clinton’s lead shrinking. Whether the race is actually tied or not is less important than the inescapable truth that the trend favors Obama.

Every Democrat I talk to believes if Clinton loses Pennyslvania the race ends there. Why? Because Clinton has defined it as a can’t-lose, must-win state and Democrats eager to end the prolonged battle for the nomination will conclude Obama can win a “big state.”

More importantly, they will conclude that Democrats in an ethnically, economically, educationally and religiously diverse state will have sized up the candidates and the race and said we know the deal, and the race ends now. Obama’s the nominee. Let’s fight the Republicans.

The coverage of Penn’s departure will play up the sense of chaos and disorder at Hillary’s headquarters in Arlington, Va.

I have a different take. I believe Penn’s departure, while bad for headlines, could be good for the candidate and very good for her over-worked and beleaguered senior staff.

If Penn’s detractors are to believed, he had a suffocating effect on Clinton’s team, more probably than she fully realized. It is possible that those in Hillaryland who have smoldered for weeks or months about Penn’s approach to the campaign will find new freedom and new energy and the campaign will find within itself a sense of possibility and renewal. We will know the answer to this question within a week in terms of Clinton’s speeches and ads.

Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh believes that’s already happened with Clinton’s crisper and more economically focused stump speech. Clinton has also looked fresher and more inventive with ideas last to woo on-line donors by having them direct where in Pennsylvania their contribution will be spent and a new ad in North Carolina (where Clinton trails) soliciting questions about the economy that Clinton will answer in subsequent TV spots (yes, that’s a canned conversation, but it at least has a bit more flair than the standard TV spots and offers the prospect of more ads, signaling the campaign isn’t on its deathbed). If ever a campaign needed a blast of energy, enthusiasm and rebirth, it’s this one. Penn’s exit offers that possibility. But only that.

The more conventional analysis of Penn’s ouster is that the smell of death will overwhelm the staff and they will grow ever more morose at the loss of their chief scapegoat. That depression will only deepen into lethargy, the theory goes, with the realization that Penn’s heading back to his mega-bucks job at Burson while their own resumes and reputations will be forever smudged (tainted?) by the massive failure of the most “inevitable” campaign in American presidential history.

The Bourbon Room has learned from top Democratic sources that six-term U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a staunch defender of President Bill Clinton during the GOP-led impeachment, will endorse Barack Obama for president during an 11 a.m. EST conference call.

Leahy will appear on the conference call with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

Leahy is the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and also led the fight against GOP efforts to delay and some cases deny confirmation of Clinton-nominated federal judges during the final two years of the Clinton presidency.

Leahy also opposed the Iraq war resolution and has been at the forefront of Democratic criticism of President Bush’s detention policies for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the Bush “terrorist surveillance” program.

Leahy also helped negotiate the first Patriot Act and was instrumental in reauthorizing the law with changes that reduced the federal government’s power to search library and personal records of American citizens implicated but not charged in terrorist investigations.

Elected in 1974, Leahy is Vermont’s longest serving senator and was among te first in the Senate to have an official website (launched in 1995) and in 2003 was the first senator to launch a personal blog “More from the floor.”

Council Bluffs, Iowa — In her revised stump speech today to kickoff a five-day “Hil-a-copter” tour of Iowa, Hillary Clinton added a new riff to her latest meditation on change.

After repeating the riff she debuted at Thursday’s Iowa Public Television debate that change must be worked for, not hoped for (Barack Obama), or demanded (John Edwards), Clinton added that to achieve necessary “change” a president needed to know “when to stand your ground and when to find common ground. ” Lest anyone miss the point, Clinton added the rhetorical candied cherry. “This is not a dictatorship.
It was safe to assume this was a direct reference to John Edwards. But assumptions usually work out poorly. Clinton staff confirmed Edwards was the target.

Clinton drew (by my count) fewer than 250 people to her much-ballyhooed “Every County Counts ” launch at Thomas Jefferson High School here. Twenty minutes before the event was scheduled to start, the room was nearly half empty. But even when the crowd trickled in to fill the available seats, all the tell-tale signs of advance team “shrinking the room” tactics were well in evidence.

The rows had double-First-Class leg room. The aisles were unnaturally large. Clinton’s podium was shoved into the room. And the press corps and risers were unnecessarily close to Clinton (unless, of course, the idea was to make the room look small and packed on TV cameras). Big swaths of unused space was filled up by three tables of coffee and cookies (who said small crowds are all bad). In characteristic Clinton fashion, the event started late — 30 minutes late this time.

Team Clinton announced the event on Friday and brought former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey from neighboring Nebraska (just across the river from here) in to announce his endorsement. Kerrey appeared genuine and that struck me. I well remember his often biting criticism President Bill Clinton’s political timidity.

“Please don’t let us down,” Kerrey implored, speaking to potential caucus-going Democrats. “We are counting on you.”

Then Kerrey, one of those politicians least likely to invoke prayer in public, concluded with this: “I give you my senator and soon, I pray, our president.”

Despite Kerrey’s presence and all the advance hoo-hah of the Hil-a-copter, the event still felt underwhelming — especially since camp Clinton pointed to it as a demonstration of newfound energy.

Clinton gave it her best, promising to bring “perseverance and perspiration” to the Oval Office. “Our campaign is energized, we’re picking up momentum and we’re going all the way to January 3rd.”

On the road to January 3rd, Clinton will no doubt keep an eye peeled for looming Democratic dictators.

JOHNSTON, Iowa — Quick impressions of early stages of Democratic debate on Iowa Public Television.

Edwards: Looks crisp and confident and has clearly honed his populist message about the role of corporate influence on American political life, his line “corporate power and greed have literally taken over the government,” will stand as one of the punchiest of the day and crystallizes his campaign theme. His fumbling of his desire that this generation leave the nation in better shape than it was found left a humanizing and humorous feeling in the air

Obama: Hit solid notes on root causes of mortgage crisis and willingness to pay for new programs with spending cuts or higher taxes. Didn’t get bogged down in policy fine points, but sounded skilled enough to deal with any lingering concerns about “experience” on core economic issues. Line about 12,000 U.S. corporations on an offshore island representing either the biggest building on earth or the biggest tax scam is likely to be remembered, in part because it was delivered as if not obsessively rehersed (which it probably was).

Clinton: Went straight to glory days of Bill Clinton’s roaring ’90s economy and “fiscal discipline,” playing straight to Iowa Democrats who still fondly recall the Clinton economic years and the balanced budgets and surpluses that came with them (even if the GOP-controlled Congress of that era drove some of the politics and policy toward balanced budgets). Clinton looked a bit tense and sounded a bit more harsh than she probably realized, but that might just be opening debate jitters. Very solid on health care issue, showing she’s ready to debate that issue vigorously in the campaign’s closing days (Clinton camp already prepping attack ads on Obama in New Hampshire on this issue).

JOHNSTON, Iowa — Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman , Terry McAuliffe wants all those concerned to know all is well in camp Clinton.

“You know, you hear this in campaigns all the time, McAuliffe said, referring to persistent reports of turmoil, panic and back-biting as Hillary’s numbers slide in early primary and caucus states. “We are the front runner, everybody’s been going after us. We feel very good about where we are. I’m chairman of the campaign and I can tell you we are happy. Everybody’s working together. We’re all focused to get people to the polls on election day and getting them to vote for Hillary Clinton, the candidate of choice and the candidate who can bring change.”

Without prompting McAuliffe named names in how integrated things are in the Clinton campaign, and sounding very much like a general manager of a sports team, made sure to send a vote of confidence to campaign manager Patty Solis Doyle: “There could be 5 or 6 polls out on a day and Hillary could be up in four, but if we’re down in one, that one gets played. And then all of a sudden the campaign is in trouble. Everyone outside the campaign likes to make circular firing squads. I talk to the president every day, I talk to Hillary every day and I talk to Patty Solis almost every day. We’re all focused and working hard. People on the outside like to chatter, but you know that’s not going to get us off our mission of getting Hillary Clinton elected.”

(more…)