By John Lyon
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — What the Obama presidency needs now is “a good dose of Clintonism,” the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign said today.
Mark Penn, who first went to work for the Clintons in 1994 when then-President Bill Clinton hired him as an adviser following the Democratic Party’s dramatic losses in that year’s midterm elections, said Obama faces many of the same challenges President Clinton faced 16 years ago.
Clinton bounced back from those losses with “some small things like balancing the budget, reforming welfare and creating 24 million jobs,” Penn said during a talk at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service.
Clinton learned from the 1994 losses and began “moving the country to the center in a way that people felt the president was listening to them,” Penn said, adding that Clinton’s successes could be traced back to the fact that he had clearly defined strategies.
“As you recall, President Clinton had a very clear economic strategy,” he said. “Elements of his economic strategy were popular; some were not so popular. He believed in expanding trade, he believed in expanding investment in infrastructure, education — math and science. He believed in closing the federal deficit. Those three elements were a strategy that everybody understood.”
Obama should follow suit, according to Penn.
“The president is going to need a deficit strategy,” he said. “Without a clear deficit strategy, people are going to say it’s out of control.”
The president’s bipartisan commission on the deficit is “a first step toward that strategy, but at the end of the day that’s not a substitute for that strategy,” he said.
Penn accused the media of focusing on voters with extreme views and not giving enough attention to voters in the center who he said historically have held “the governing mantle of the country.”
The center is especially important now, he said, noting that according to a recent poll the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as independents is greater than the percentage who identify themselves as Democrats and the percentage who identify themselves as Republicans.
“The biggest party in America at the moment is no party,” he said.
Regarding efforts to overhaul the nation’s health care system, Penn said he believes the Obama administration looked at Hillary Clinton’s failed 1993 reform effort and decided a different approach would be more successful.
“What they learned was that it didn’t matter how you approached the problem,” he said. “Even if you did what previous people didn’t do, it still got to the very same place, which is that people are reluctant to see big change in their health care system all at once.”
Penn predicted Obama will push for more limited changes to health care to keep the process moving and will begin to view comprehensive reform as “an end point rather than a starting point.”
