Mark Penn is a Lazy, Incompetent Hack

Former Clinton campaign Chief Non-Strategist Mark Penn has been desperately trying to brush off the oily veneer of disrepute he accumulated during his many Rove-inspired attempts in 2008 to paint Barack Obama as a cocaine-addled, anti-American former drug dealer.

After the campaign, Penn went back to his former life as a writer, Tatooine crime lord, professional lie-merchant, pollster and paid agent of foreign governments.

His new column in the Wall Street Journal, which he appears to have spent exactly twenty whole minutes researching, was a triumph in fetid laziness.

Wonkette sums it up:

Failed campaign strategist/pollster/tyrant Mark Penn writes in his always forward-thinking Microtrends column today: “Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend.” Hooray! We’re eating steaks tonight! And then maybe some dancing, MMHMM? Tell us more: “In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.” Hoor– HUH? Oh god this entire fucking column is wrong, isn’t it?

Mark Penn’s problem is that he operates from a very wrong premise, shared by many people who don’t know what they’re talking about: If print newspapers are dying, then bloggers must be raking it in! (BY STEALING.)

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”...

One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.

All of this is wrong. You will not make money blogging, especially now. There are not 452,000 Americans making their living as full-time bloggers. Probably 10,000, to be charitable. And that $75,000 average? WHAAA? This isn’t Gawker in late 2007, you ogre! The *median* is $22,000.

Penn really should really go back to the things he's really good at -- like tormenting hapless members of the Rebel Alliance -- and leave our tortured minds in peace.