The strategist of small things: does Mark Penn's relentless focus on microdemographics really make a broader liberal agenda impossible?

• Author: Kilgore, Ed
• Position: Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes - Book review

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne Twelve, 368 pp.

If Microtrends had been published under the name of coauthor E. Kinney Zalesne rather than Mark Penn, it would probably have been a quiet best-seller with a cult following. Instead, it's being evaluated, for better or worse, as a glimpse into the mind of Hillary Clinton's chief strategist and pollster. And in many progressive circles, Penn is often thought of as exemplifying the dark side of Clintonism. The reasons are legion: his corporate background and current position as CEO of a massive public relations firm noted for union busting; his association with Dick Morris and the alleged "triangulation" strategy for Bill Clinton's reelection campaign in 1996; his penchant for media-friendly catchphrases for key voter subcategories (e.g., soccer morns and office park dads); and his informal reputation among rival pollsters for opaque and questionable methodologies.

A sprawling book like Microtrends, which purports to identify seventy-five distinct subcategories (sixty-four American, and eleven international) of people who have yet to get noticed by corporate and political marketers, provides plenty of targets for Penn detractors. In a review for In These Times, Ezra Klein cherry-picked some of the sillier and sloppier sections of the book, and constructed a demolition not just of Penn, but of political pollsters generally.

But it's important to understand that Microtrends isn't primarily a political book; it's classified as a business book by the publisher, and by most bookstores. And truth be told, it is probably aimed at that book-consumer sweet spot occupied nearly a generation ago by its obvious model: John Naisbett's Megatrends, which for a couple of years in the early 1980s was required reading for business executives, politicians, and pretty much anyone who wanted to appear well informed. It's a niche book about niche markets, destined to become, in its "quality paperback" iteration, a staple of airport bookstands.

Moreover, the book isn't a compilation of gleanings from Penn's own polling. Some of the "microtrends" are derived from census data, some from election and business reports, and some from surveys conducted by other polling firms. The mixed sources are compounded by mixed interpretive themes that aren't always of equal sophistication or seriousness. Klein's review, for example, dwells on an...