Spin, or Something

A funny thing happened on the way to the Iowa caucuses. A good name for it is, well, spin. But there are other words that might fit even better.

It happened Tuesday, after the Des Moines Register released its poll showing Barack Obama in the lead in the Democratic race. Mark Penn, chief strategist of the Clinton campaign, put out a fairly blistering memo attacking the survey’s methodology.

The DMR poll, wrote Penn, was "out of sync with the other polling done in the race… depicting an unprecedented departure from historically established turnout patterns… other recent polls all show Hillary trending up… and having the momentum in this race." See his full memo here.

We advised our people internally at the time that this argument had no merit. Penn in effect was saying the DMR should have altered its data to get a different result. Political pollsters do that all the time, but it's voodoo. In reality we were not re-living any previous caucus, so weighting the data to prior parameters was not warranted.

The criticism of DMR's work was out of line – but we didn’t learn how far out of line until this morning.  On the press plane flying from Iowa to New Hampshire, our off-air reporter Eloise Harper reports, “Mark Penn admitted to knowing that the trend was shifting towards Obama this past week.”

That means that at the very moment Penn was accusing the Des Moines Register of producing unreliable data, and saying it was Clinton who had the momentum, he knew otherwise.

The lesson in all this is less about Mr. Penn, and more about political campaigns. They are focused, admirably perhaps, on winning. What they’ll say to get there needs, always, to be taken with a grain of salt. Or maybe a five-pound bag.