Mark Penn, a profile

Mark Penn is Hillary Clinton's chief strategist. He's in his mid-50s, has a $5 million Georgetown mansion, and is married to Nancy Jacobson, a former staff member for Sen. Evan Bayh. He's been working for Hillary since 2000. He worked on Bill Clinton's re-election in 1996 and was behind his targeting of suburban women in that campaign. He worked on Tony Blair's 2005 reelection. He is the CEO of the global PR firm Burson-Marsteller, and president of the polling firm Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, which he founded in 1977 during the mayoral campaign of Ed Koch. As is typical for pollsters, Penn does not reveal who he has worked for in the past, though his bio says he advised Microsoft since 2001. He personally crafts Microsoft's message in Washington.

Here's a description of him from the Economist:

Mr Penn is a committed centrist who thinks elections are won by wooing swing voters rather than revving up the base. He is happiest with the politics of “triangulation” (ie, poaching supposedly Republican issues) and with micro-issues that are heavy on symbolism, such as school uniforms. He is a visceral foe of the politics of class war as sometimes practised by Bob Shrum, who lost all eight of the presidential campaigns he worked on.

The Nation writes this:

Despite the risks he poses, it's easy to figure out why Hillary clings to Penn. The Clintons (like the Bushes) put a premium on loyalty, and they credit Penn with saving Bill's presidency. After the 1994 election, Democrats had just lost both houses of Congress and Clinton was floundering in the polls. At the urging of his wife, Bill turned to Dick Morris, a controversial friend from their time in Arkansas. Morris knew Penn from his days as a pollster in New York and brought him into the White House. Morris decided what to poll and Penn polled it. They immediately pushed Clinton to the right, enacting the now-infamous strategy of "triangulation," which co-opted Republican policies like welfare reform and tax cuts and emphasized small-bore issues that supposedly cut across the ideological divide. "They were the ones who said 'Make the '96 election about nothing except V-Chips and school uniforms,'" says a former Clinton adviser. When Morris got caught with a call girl, Penn became the most important adviser in Clinton's second term. "In a White House where polling is virtually a religion," the Washington Post reported in 1996, "Penn is the high priest." He became known as the "most powerful man in Washington you've never heard of."

What are his "problems" exactly? His contacts are not exactly friendly to liberal Democrats, creating controversy. The Nation continues:

Burson-Marsteller is hardly a natural fit for a prominent Democrat. The firm has represented everyone from the Argentine military junta to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which thousands were killed when toxic fumes were released by one of its plants, to Royal Dutch Shell, which has been accused of massive human rights violations in Nigeria. B-M pioneered the use of pseudo-grassroots front groups, known as "astroturfing," to wage stealth corporate attacks against environmental and consumer organizations. It set up the National Smokers Alliance on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s. Its current clients include major players in the finance, pharmaceutical and energy industries. In 2006, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57 percent of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates.

Sam Rosenfeld and Matthew Yglesias write this in the American Prospect:

The news that Mark Penn is serving as Clinton's pollster and key political adviser (a role he's maintained since her first Senate race) should send shivers down the spines of any liberal. Penn's idée fixe since the 1990s has been the invention of new "swing" groups composed of prosperous white men ("wired workers," "office-park dads," etc.) for the purposes of arguing that the Democratic Party should become less economically progressive. In addition to his work for Clinton and for various corporations such as Citibank, Texaco, and Microsoft, Penn was for years house pollster for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), where support for Clinton also runs strong.

The Washington Post did a profile of Penn:

In the four months since Clinton officially became a candidate, Penn has consolidated his power, according to advisers close to the campaign, taking increasing control of the operation. Armed with voluminous data that he collects through his private polling firm, Penn has become involved in virtually every move Clinton makes, with the result that the campaign reflects the chief strategist as much as the candidate. If Clinton seems cautious, it may be because Penn has made caution a science, repeatedly testing issues to determine which ones are safe and widely agreed upon (he was part of the team that encouraged Clinton's husband to run on the issue of school uniforms in 1996). If Clinton sounds middle-of-the-road, it may be because Penn is a longtime pollster for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council whose clients have included Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.).

Penn has deep roots in the national security wing of the Democratic Party, along with other centrist Democrats -- some of them Jewish and pro-Israel, like Penn -- who saw the merits of invading Iraq before the war began. "Penn has always believed that strength is critical for running the country, and that people want to have a president who's going to be willing to defend the country -- that's the number one criteria," said Al From, the chief executive of the Democratic Leadership Council, who considers Penn a friend.

Penn said that he has been cleared of all client responsibilities, except for Microsoft, for the duration of the campaign but that he still relies on a team of about 20 employees to do most of the day-to-day work. Though running a major company and a presidential campaign at the same time would seem to provide a number of possible conflicts, Penn insists there are none.

Nonetheless, it is an unusual arrangement. In the 2000 race, then-Gov. George W. Bush forced his top strategist, Karl Rove, to sell his direct-mail business to eliminate the perception of any conflicts of interest and to guarantee that his full attention would be on the campaign. While other consultants also do lucrative corporate work, no one holds as senior a corporate position as Penn's while effectively running a presidential campaign.

He has a book coming out this month. Here's a synopsis from the Economist:

The big idea of “Microtrends” is a little idea: that many of the most interesting and potentially most lucrative discoveries about markets are made by looking at the small picture, finding the microtrends hidden deep in the details of the data. Mr Penn, and his co-author, Kinney Zalesne, divide the population into 75 sub-groups, and pick out the microtrends that are driving them.