Consultants and the invisible hand

Via Jonathan Bernstein, Jonathan Chait takes on the hardly-necessary but always-welcome task of demolishing Mark Penn's latest utterances.  Feel free to click for the details, but I was struck by one point Chait made:

One fact that has grown increasingly clear over the last two years is that the Democratic Party dodged a bullet by not nominating or electing a presidential candidate whose chief political adviser is Mark Penn.

Ah, but this is the beauty of the free market.  The Democratic Party dodged this bullet in large part because Penn was advising his candidate to do things like ignore the caucus states and mis-allocate scarce campaign resources.  Had a more competent consultant been advising Hillary Clinton in 2008, she might well be president today.