Hillary’s guru has some tips for Gordon

An interview with Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist

If Hillary Clinton is sworn in as 44th President of the United States in January 2009, the man sitting opposite me in the bar of the Dorchester will become one of the most powerful people in the world. Mark Penn, pollster extraordinaire, adviser to Tony Blair in the 2005 election, and legendary number-cruncher to Bill Clinton is now chief strategist to the Democrat frontrunner and, it is widely believed, Hillary’s alter ego, the man she calls at 7 a.m. wherever she is in the world. In her memoirs, she calls him ‘brilliant and intense’ and ‘shrewd and insightful’.

But it is to discuss Penn’s own book, Microtrends: the Small Forces Behind Today’s Big Changes (Allen Lane, £20), that we are talking over a forest of Diet Cokes today. The book advances the central thesis that the age of thunderous ‘macro-trends’ plotted by writers such as Alvin Toffler (Future Shock) and John Naisbitt (Megatrends) is emphatically at an end.

‘The world may be getting flatter, in terms of globalisation,’ he writes, ‘but it is occupied by six billion little bumps who do not have to follow the herd to be heard. No matter how offbeat their choices, they can now find 100,000 people or more who share their taste for deep fried yak on a stick.’ We are observing ‘the niching of America’, says the 53-year-old pollster, an ever-changing mosaic of ‘small, under-the-radar forces that can involve as little as 1 per cent of the population, but which are powerfully shaping our society’. Choice has prevailed over uniformity. It is ‘the triumph of the Starbucks economy over the Ford economy’.

The book is an excellent read, not least because Penn provides 75 examples of his theory (‘a periodic table of trends’), meaning that Microtrends is also great fun to go back to, and dip into.