Mark Penn: Time to kick him to the curb and go on, girl?

This Time Magazine article and other post-Iowa chatter about the Clinton campaign may be asking this question too late...

Is Penn's strategy -- of packaging Hillary as "inevitable" and playing from the beginning as if the nomination was in the bag and all that mattered was positioning her as electable in the general -- the wrong one?

On the one hand, it succeeded in shaking off the labels that had plagued her since the first rumors of her candidacy: that she was too polarizing, too liberal, unelectable...

Painting her as the candidate of experience and de-emphasizing her progressive side did quiet those incessant objections. As did the more hawkish persona she was developing in the Senate with votes such as the infamous Iran resolution, which personally disappointed me... and, of course, her refusal to call her initial Iraq war authorization vote a mistake.

These tactics worked to overhaul her previous image, and maybe they gave her the front-runner status she held for so long... that and her unrivaled debate performances, one after another.

But will this rigid new image cost her in the end?

Where's the real Hillary we knew and loved? (or hated? But that's the thing. She could vote for all the hawkish resolutions the Senate could come up with and she's not going to get Newt Gingrich's endorsement. That's just the way it is. Some people aren't going to win every heart. Hillary's never going to be an Obama or a Huckabee, or even a Bill Clinton. But not every president has been a populist or had a million-dollar smile.)

Maybe it would have been better not to gloss over her rough edges, the things that would make her a hard sell in November. Because Democrats, especially progressive Democrats, are hungry for change, and Democrats are the ones who will say who's around in November. They proved in Iowa that electability is important, by effectively ending two candidacies that were perfectly valid but had failed to take off. They want someone to rally behind. But their mantra is CHANGE.

The question is, how can the first serious female candidate for the U.S. presidency, a woman with an impressive 35-year career working for progressive goals, who's already given us a viable health care plan, the proto-health care plan of today (as first lady, back when she would have gotten more points for keeping her mouth shut and worrying about the White House decor) not be associated with the word "change?"

Someone wasn't watching the ball. I don't think it's necessarily too late to turn things around, but the boss needs to do it her way, from here on out.