Andy Rowell, 13 February 2008 

After yesterday’s three victories for Barak Obama in the Potomac Primaries, the political momentum for the Democratic nomination finally seems to be swinging his way.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign seems to be faltering at a crucial moment, but victories in the crucial states of Texas and Ohio, which vote on 4^th March, could mean that she steals the nomination from Obama’s grasp.

Central to Hillary and Barak’s success over the next month will be their advisors and pollsters. Clinton’s campaign has suffered over the last week from the demotion of her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, and resignation of her deputy campaign manager, Mike Henry. So who are the main “hidden persuaders” left behind each person and what can they tell us about each candidate?

Barak Obama’s chief advisor is David Axelrod, one of the most pre-eminent political consultants in the United States, whose career was made assisting black candidates become Mayors across America. In 2004, Axelrod also helped Obama score a landslide win in his US Senate campaign. Two years later, he worked for Deval Patrick, the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, who was elected the first ever African American governor of Massachusetts in November 2006.

Also in 2006, Axelrod oversaw the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s media program, helping the Democrats regain the majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since the days of Republican Newt Gingrich in 1994. When America’s oldest liberal magazine, The Nation, wrote a profile of Axelrod in February last year it noted that Axelrod was one of America’s “most successful and respected” political advisors. Note that last word: respect. Here was a Democrat fighting a Democratic fight.

In contrast, Clinton’s key political advisor is Mark Penn, who has rightly attracted his fair share of criticism. “The news that Mark Penn is serving as Clinton's pollster and key political adviser, should send shivers down the spines of any liberal” wrote two journalists from another liberal American magazine Prospect last year.

The reason that Prospect was so bothered about Penn, was because of his other jobs. Not only is he Clinton’s chief political advisor and pollster, he also runs his own corporate polling firm as well as being the Worldwide President and Chief Executive of the public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller.

In May last year, in contrast to the positive profile on Axelrod, The Nation attacked Penn, calling him “perhaps the most important figure” in Hillary’s campaign. The Nation took issue with Penn’s corporate connections, which created a “dilemma” for Clinton, because “Penn represents many of the interests whose influence candidate Clinton--in an attempt to appeal to an increasingly populist Democratic electorate--has vowed to curtail.”

Penn’s political polling firm is called PSB – or Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates. It has defended pharmaceutical companies against the charges that its products harm them, big oil companies such as Texaco as well as the controversial company, Monsanto, which is trying to persuade the world to eat genetically modified food. Penn himself is called the “master of the message” – he is the ultimate spin doctor.

With someone linked to Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Biotech you would think Hillary would dump Penn as quickly as possible, but she has done the complete opposite. Penn has been both Bill and Hillary’s most trusted advisor for a decade. The Clintons credit Penn with saving Bill's presidency. During that presidency, Penn was labeled the “most powerful man in Washington you've never heard of.”

During Bill’s tenure at the White House, Penn became incredibly politically powerful. It was said he was the only person who could get the two most powerful “Bills” on the phone: Clinton and Bill Gates, the chairman of the global giant, Microsoft. Ironically Penn's largest client at the time was Microsoft, which was actually being sued by Bill Clinton’s government in what was then the country’s largest antitrust case.

Penn was working for both the prosecution and defence: but if he thought he had a conflict of interest, he has never let on. But Penn’s conflict of interest is much worse now than a decade ago.

In 2001, the global communications giants, WPP bought Penn’s polling firm. Four years later they made him Chief Executive of the controversial public relations company, Burson-Marsteller, which is also owned by WPP.

As the Nation article pointed out: “Burson-Marsteller is hardly a natural fit for a prominent Democrat”. That is actually an understatement of huge proportions. Burson-Marsteller, known as B-M, is a company that any self-respecting Democrat would run a mile from and have absolutely nothing to do with.

Firstly, B-M is essentially a Republican firm. By far the majority of its corporate leadership is Republican. Charlie Black, the head of B-M’s influential subsidiary BKSH is close to the White House and Karl Rove, the man once called “Bush’s brain” before he retired. Another Senior B-M executive is the former head of the Republican National Committee. Damaging although this is to Clinton, the most damaging to her is B-M’s history, which is one of representing polluting companies as well as despotic governments with appalling human rights records.

B-M has a history of working with major polluters. Its clients have included: the American Petroleum Institute, British Petroleum, Chevron, Ford Motor Company, Mitsubishi, Pennzoil Occidental Petroleum, and the government of Saudi Arabia.

In the seventies it worked with Babcock and Wilcox after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in the US, causing America’s worst nuclear disaster. The following decade, it worked with Union Carbide after the Bhopal disaster in India, which caused death or injury to tens and tens of thousands of people.

The company has pioneered deceptive PR tactics such as the use of “corporate front groups”, which are organizations that look and sound like they are formed by concerned citizens fighting an environmental or health issue but are essentially companies in disguise. In the late eighties in Canada it set up the British Colombia Forest Alliance, which was a front organisation used by the timber industry to argue to cut down more trees. B-M formed the Forest Protection Society in Australia that did not “protect” forests, it chopped them down.

The Business Council For Sustainable Development was set up by BM to seem like big business cared about the environment, but when all it wanted was the continuation of the status quo. Another classic was the National Smokers Alliance which was formed by B-M on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s.

It has also worked with some of the most despotic regimes on earth. The firm was there to help the Argentine junta “improve its international image” in the mid-seventies, when some 35,000 people “disappeared”.  Some of the torture techniques used at the time were el submarino (holding a person's head under water or excrement until near drowning), la picana (electric prod applied to the most sensitive parts of the body), or rape. It also worked with Indonesia when it was accused of genocide in East Timor.

B-M’s subsidiary also worked with the military junta in Nigeria which was accused of widespread human rights abuses in the nineties, including the judicial murder of the Nigerian author and activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa. More recently Burson-Marsteller led the account for the Iraqi National Congress to persuade the world to remove Saddam Hussein. As the Colombia Journalism Review reported “There is little doubt that influencing public opinion through the American and European media was always central to the INC’s mission … One of the first uses for the Iraq Liberation Act funds was to hire the giant public relations firm Burson-Marsteller.”

Just as the company had to spin the case for war it has had to try and spin the consequences of war. In 2005, B-M’s subsidiary, BKSH, that had represented the Nigeria junta, received a contract with the Lincoln Group, the disgraced PR firm that covertly placed US military propaganda in Iraqi news outlets.

In 2007, Mark Penn and BM had to defend themselves after it emerged that the same subsidiary, BKSH was representing Blackwater, the controversial American security firm accused of killing 17 Iraqis in September. After the Democratic candidate, John Edwards raised the issue on the campaign trail, B-M dropped Blackwater’s contract saying that B-M thought it “was the right thing to do.”

Hillary Clinton sees no conflict of interest between her Democratic ideals and her hiring someone whose firm’s activities would truly send a shiver down the spin of the majority of Democrats. If Hillary were to win the Democratic race, Penn would be in a position of huge power once again.

Penn would have unprecedented privileged access to the White House, which could be of huge benefit to his clients eager to lobby the new President. But if Hillary did become President, who would Penn be representing when he came knocking at her door: the powerful polluters, the evil despots or the people of America?