The Note: Philadelphia Freedom

April 9, 2008 -- "How Not to Win Pennsylvania," by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton:

1. Let staff turmoil subsume your efforts to maintain a narrative that focuses on your opponent.

2. Allow a controversial aide to stay close enough to your inner circle so your opponents can keep that story alive.

3. Permit questions to swirl about your position on trade issues that are more serious than those you're trying to raise about your opponent.

4. Watch your husband's past statements and actions take you wildly, horribly off-message.

5. Become Al Gore.

If Mark Penn is right and his semi-departure is a three-day story at most, it expired last night. Mark Penn is not right. (And he has his former boss -- in part -- to blame. Did he poll on this one?)

Such is the state of the Democratic race that Clinton, D-N.Y., needs to be driving a consistent message -- at least implicitly arguing that Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., isn't up to the job -- while all Obama has to do is run out the clock and not make news.

(And no, Elton John won't get that job done Wednesday evening. Nominees for least likely song to be played at Clinton's New York fundraiser with Sir Elton: "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me"? "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road"? "Candle in the Wind"? "The Bitch is Back"?)

The candidates each got their handful of minutes in the Senate spotlight Tuesday without breaking much new ground -- good news for Obama, who mostly needed not to stumble.

That leaves the focus on Penn and the Colombia trade deal -- and Obama's union allies aren't likely to let up, at least not as long as Penn remains in the campaign orbit.

"Mark Penn continues to roil Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign," Bloomberg's Lorraine Woellert reports. "Pennsylvania is a must-win state for her, and the Penn controversy, if it lingers, may damage her courtship of blue-collar workers." (This from James Carville, on new strategist Geoff Garin: "If they think they're going to let him be used in some bait-and-switch campaign, they're mistaken.")

If only Penn were the end of the story. Guess who else supports the Colombia pact? Politico's Ben Smith scares up the quote (translated from Spanish) from June 2005: "I am in favor of the free trade agreement," said former President Bill Clinton (the one strategist who cannot be demoted).

This is where the (thick) rubber of the Clintons' financial entanglements hits the (icy) road of presidential politics. Huffington Post reports that Bill Clinton was paid $800,000 in 2005 by a group "tasked with bringing investment to the country and educating world leaders about the Colombia's business opportunities."

The Clinton campaign confirms the former president's support for the trade deal. "The acknowledgment adds new hurdles to the New York senator's bid to woo Democratic voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who believe free trade agreements have eliminated thousands of U.S. jobs," the AP's Charles Babington writes.

"Many Democrats oppose the deal, amid mounting concerns about free trade as well as the murders of trade unionists in Colombia by right-wing paramilitaries," John R. Emshwiller and Bob Davis write in The Wall Street Journal.

"More broadly, economic concerns have made trade pacts -- such as the North American Free Trade Agreement pushed through Congress in the early 1990s by President Clinton -- a hot issue in the Democratic presidential race."

ABC's George Stephanopoulos, on "Good Morning America" Wednesday: "It comes at the worst possible time. . . . It's going to be hard for Sen. Clinton to shake this issue, and it's an important one to a lot of labor unions in Pennsylvania."

Husbands and wives can disagree, and only one of them is on the ballot. But: "Not sure about you, but I'm wide awake," Slate's Christopher Beam writes.

"Given the degree to which Hillary participated in her husband's administration, shouldn't we expect Bill to be as (if not more) influential in hers? Also, there's a difference between a wanton adviser and a contradictory spouse."

It leaves Sen. Clinton on the defensive, again. "As I have said for months, I oppose the deal. I have spoken out against the deal, I will vote against the deal, and I will do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement," she told the Communications Workers of America union in Washington Tuesday.

Obama supporters James Hoffa Jr. didn't do the Obama campaign any favors in equating Austan Goolsbee with Penn, but the fact is there's no real comparison.

And it's not the only area where Bill Clinton, again, has his wife's campaign off-message. ABC's Jake Tapper reports that Clinton last year advised Steven Spielberg not to sever ties with the Beijing Olympics; Sen. Clinton this week made headlines by calling on President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies.

The campaign missteps have a cumulative effect. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman: "I am less interested in Penn than in what Penn's rise and fall tell us about Clinton herself, and about the boneheaded fundamentals of her campaign. Penn has not been the source of her woes, only a symptom."

"It would be easy to dismiss all of this as fairly conventional political stumbling -- if she hadn't made her supreme readiness and managerial competence the central issue of her presidential campaign," Politico's David Paul Kuhn and Jim VandeHei report.

"But since she has, a growing number of Democrats are comparing the Clinton and Obama campaigns -- their first real exercise in executive leadership -- and rendering harsh assessments of her stewardship."

Clinton can argue that there's "something of a double standard" in her being asked whether she would drop out of the race -- as she said Tuesday on NPR's "All Things Considered."

But she's right only in this sense: There's one standard for the candidate who's winning, and another for the candidate who's losing.

The Quinnipiac Poll, showing a tighter race in Pennsylvania, is making its way into the news coverage. Headline in the Harrisburg Patriot-News: "Clinton dips in state polls, threatening her viability."

And as the ad wars rage -- five new Clinton ads are up, jostling for position with four new Obama spots -- Obama is set to break all spending records in Pennsylvania. "Nobody has ever spent 2.2 million in this state: not Rendell, not Specter, not Casey, not Santorum, not Bush, not Kerry," Democratic media consultant Neil Oxman tells The Boston Globe's Sasha Issenberg.

"Mr. Obama has spent roughly half of his money in the expensive Philadelphia media market, which covers the southeastern suburban communities that are seen as a key battleground in this contest," James O'Toole writes in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

"[CMAG's Evan] Tracey said Mr. Obama's financial advantage could be seen not just in the sheer volume of his advertising, but also in the types of shows -- including expensive prime-time programs -- during which his ads appear."