That Mark Penn Thing

Digression:
Liberal bloggers hate Mark Penn. When I first started paying obsessive attention to the presidential campaign and American politics in general about a year ago, I didn't know who he was except he was some guy associated with the Clintons.
I mean, really, what person with a job and a family and a real life has time to keep track of all this stuff? Like most people, I had never heard of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz or Douglas Feith either before the Iraq War, which produced a rash of publicity for the neocons.
Which is just to say that there are plenty of rich and powerful people we've never heard of even if we did read a story in Time magazine ten years ago that mentioned some of them.
End of digression:
A TPM writer thinks it's notable that an anecdotal story emerging in Time's story about the Clinton campaign's mistakes relates a meeting at which Penn apparently believed that a Hillary win in California would net her all 370 delegates from that state. The campaign's chief strategist didn't know that the Democrats do not have a winner-takes-all system, like the Republicans. Instead, delegates are designated in a proportional manner according to the votes for each primary candidate.
It is rather appalling, although Hillary herself is falling back on the argument that she'd be the nominee today if the Democrats did it like the Republicans, evidence some say that she's really a closet Republican.
This anecdote is supposed to show that the Clinton campaign, like the Bush pattern, valued loyalty over competence.
As one commenter put it, "I think this is testament to the idea that just because someone is a ruthless bastard doesn't meen they are a SMART ruthless bastard."
Karl Rove, anyone?
Rove was once believed to be the smartest of all. Mark Halperin (I call him Mr. Smirky), former political director at ABC News and now with Time, actually wrote a whole book about how the Democrats should follow Rovian tactics to win and if they didn't, they'd lose.
That was before the 2006 election, I think, and I suspect the book didn't sell too well afterwards.