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By MARK PENN
Published July 29, 2009

It sounds so simple: Just tax the few to pay for social programs that benefit the many.

Yet no political idea — embodied by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call to tax the wealthy to cover health care for everyone else — has ever proved more contentious. The country was founded on the principle of unlimited and unbounded opportunity. Despite what poll questions often appear to say, class warfare language, outside the Democratic primary electorate, has always been politically counterproductive, because it divides Americans from one another and from their own aspirations and dreams.

And class warfare could be especially problematic now, considering that many of the Democratic Party’s newest supporters are among the highest-income categories — groups that had previously voted overwhelmingly Republican.

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Mark Penn reviews the current health care debate on Fox Business News with Neil Cavuto. Watch the video at Fox Business News.

By MARK PENN
Published July 9, 2009

Unless some tough decisions are made soon, rising jobless figures will most likely hit what could be a public opinion and political tripwire: 10 percent unemployment.

If and when the country crosses that line, it will be the No. 1 news story for days, recent stock market gains could recede, and consumer confidence will fall. And whether or not the economic crisis is coming to an end, such a high unemployment level has the potential to undermine the hard-won confidence enjoyed by the Obama administration. The Republicans will quickly claim all we have is more debt and fewer jobs.

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By MARK PENN
Published June 18, 2009

Everyone knows the story of what went wrong in 1993 with health care reform: virtually everything.

The plan was written by a White House task force, all the health care interests bitterly opposed it and spent heavily against it, the Republicans moved to kill it, Democrats in Congress got cold feet, and the reputations of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton administration were thrown for a loop. The 1994 midterm elections changed both houses of Congress, and for years afterward, health care reform was achieved only incrementally.

While Hillary Clinton and others spearheaded the move to cover 6 million children with the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, little else got done. Medical records remain a shambles, the medical malpractice system is broken, the number of uninsured is up and the Medicare trust fund is looking like a subprime mortgage.

The core political problem of health care is really not about all of the rhetoric or posturing. It’s about the math of universal health care.

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By MARK PENN
Published June 3, 2009

To: President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

While America has been preoccupied with the fight over the Guantanamo detainees and now the GM bankruptcy, and the United Kingdom has been distracted by the expense forms of its parliamentary members, two other countries have decided to move forward with their plans for nuclear weapons: North Korea and Iran.

Their actions have become remarkably brazen.

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Democratic Strategist Mark Penn discusses how President Obama has tacked to the center on recent foreign policy decisions, including those on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, and that these decisions have been the key to his high approval ratings with the American people.

Watch the video now at MSNBC

Democratic Strategist Mark Penn discusses the administration’s keys to success in passing healthcare reform, including gaining consensus and focusing on cost first. Mark and Alex Castellanos, Republican Strategist, also offer advice for the Republican leadership on shoring up support for the GOP.

Watch the video now on YouTube

Reviewing President Obama’s first 100 days in office, with Mark Penn, president of Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates and CNBC’s Dennis Kneale.

Mark Penn says President Obama is showing great “experience, leadership, and ability to answer one crisis after another”. Watch the video now at CNBC

By MARK PENN
Published February 20, 2009

If the $800 billion stimulus bill works, Barack Obama will go down as a great president who took bold and decisive action at a time of growing national crisis — and the midterm elections, and even his reelection, will be a breeze.

If it fails, moderate Democrats in swing states will find themselves back in the private sector in two years and Obama will face what President Bill Clinton faced in 1995: a tough uphill battle.

If you watch the TV show “House,” you can easily recognize Obama’s move. In the show, a brilliant diagnostician seeks to solve medical mysteries by trying a series of different approaches on patients who are often hurtling toward an inexplicable death. After several attempts that fail, he tries an unconventional, risky treatment that works and the patient is saved — most of the time. Occasionally, he chooses the wrong course, wiping out the immune system in the process — and the patient dies.

Obama displayed leadership, guts, decisiveness and political savvy to move one of the biggest pieces of legislation in history through Congress in record time.

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By MARK PENN with E. KINNEY ZALESNE
From The Wall Street Journal Microtrends Column
Published February 19, 2009

Presidents and politicians no longer talk about simply creating jobs — now they are creating “green jobs.” Just in the stimulus bill alone, there are said to be four million new green jobs. It’s a great term — it conjures up neatly dressed employees working under compact fluorescent lights, and factory workers in white and green helmets huddled over solar cells and wind turbines. These aren’t boring office jobs or repetitive manufacturing plant jobs — no, they’re socially useful and rewarding jobs. And they’ll save the planet, too.

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