Inept Man Invents Trends For Imaginary Audience

Professional loser Mark Penn—the strategist who can tell you exactly how to become disliked by each individual microsegment of the population—has a new book ad WSJ column. Let's talk about how stupid it is:

Today's made-up microgroup that Penn tenuously connects to current events: "Impressionable Elites." These are the types of rich folks who lost all their money to Bernie Madoff—the guy who's been in the news lately. Here are several outrageous things about this column's content and very existence:

• By Mark Penn, "With E. Kinney Zalesne." Is this column really more than a one-man job?
• This column is just a dressed up ad for Penn's ridiculous book. Seriously! He puts the full, overlong title of it right up front in the third graf. And he uses this technique, which should never be allowed in a newspaper:
  

  ...but rather the Impressionable Elites* of country clubs...

  * "Impressionable Elites" is the term we used for educated, affluent people who focus more on personality than issues when it comes to evaluating political decisions. For more, please see pages 131 to 135 in "Microtrends."

  AN ASTERISK. Which jumps to, essentially, another ad for his crappy book! There are many other qualified columnist candidates in the world, WSJ!

• "At a recent meeting of my condo..." Shut up.
• You know who is really an "Impressionable Elite?" Anybody who hires Mark Penn.

[WSJ]

Send an email to Hamilton Nolan, the author of this post, at Hamilton@gawker.com.

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