As Sam Stein reports on The Huffington Post, longtime Clinton adviser Paul Begala has just let Penn have it.
"I have nothing but contempt for Mr. Penn," said Begala at a New York City breakfast sponsored by the non-profit group Public Agenda. "And for those of us who wanted to see him out from the beginning, it became almost a Rumsfeldian thing. And he is not even fired. He has been demoted. How could this be?"
But wait, there’s more.
"Mark Penn did have this strategy," Begala said. "He wrote a book called Microtrends in which he argued that the era of big trends is over. That’s like going to New Orleans before Katrina and saying the era of big storms is over. It might end up being true but it could be really wrong."