I was out of touch most of the weekend attending an event put on by the New Politics Forum, so I missed the fact that Mark Penn took to the op-ed pages of the Sunday New York Times with a not-very-mea-culpa in which he wrote this:

While everyone loves to talk about the message, campaigns are equally about money and organization. Having raised more than $100 million in 2007, the Clinton campaign found itself without adequate money at the beginning of 2008, and without organizations in a lot of states as a result. Given her successes in high-turnout primary elections and defeats in low-turnout caucuses, that simple fact may just have had a lot more to do with who won than anyone imagines.

Talk about a blind spot. There's not a hint of irony that perhaps one reason the Clinton campaign couldn't "get by" on $100 million in '07 (or on the $212 million they eventually spent in all) is because they spent too much money on high priced pollsters and consultants who gave them crappy advice.

In addition to that, as I've mentioned before, they just didn't appear to be good stewards of their donors' money at the grass roots level either.

Penn concludes with this:

And sometimes your opponent just runs a good campaign.

True. And sometimes you just run a poor one.