The best that can ever be said of the Clinton consultants turned pundits is that they're right except for all the times they're wrong. That's certainly the case with Dick Morris, who previously said a conniving Hillary had the nomination in the bag, then adopted an air of insider omniscience in setting everyone right as to Obama's sure-thing triumph. As for the other chubby triangulator on speed-dial, Mark Penn is wrong even when he's right, and he's hardly ever that. As Hillary's chief political strategist, he thought using the word "cocaine" repeatedly on television by way of denying his camp was trying to portray Obama as a cokehead was subliminally savvy. It was not. He thought focusing on all the big states and ignoring the little ones with caucuses meant an easy glide to the Denver convention. It did not. He thought his own party's primaries allotted state delegates in a winner-take-all-fashion. Alas, they did not. Now Penn's written a piece for Politico in which he claims to have spotted the decisive voter bloc for the '08 showdown. Even if he's right, broadly speaking, he fucks his own thesis into demographic incoherence by sentence two.

In the relentless quest to find the soccer moms of this election, perhaps the answer will be found in the "active granny" vote - empty-nesters who have found a new freedom in their lives after the kids have left and who look at the world very differently than do their kids graduating college.

Penn must be referring to all those hot n' horny grannies in the Catherine Keener 40 Year-Old Virgin mold who've only just discovered the new freedom of a childless home and who sure won't be voting the way their 21 year-old spawn vote come November. And Hillary still can't figure how she lost. [Politico]