Mark, Mark, Mark. Where’d it all go wrong? There you were, the great white hope of PR people everywhere. Micro-trending your way to a place in history by guiding the ‘inevitable’ ‘virtual incumbent’ ‘ready on Day One’ straight from Hill Force One to Hill Street Blues. On the way, $13m in fees, at least 13 different slogans, and now, staring into the post-Ohio & Texas abyss.

You know things aren’t going so well when the Clintons’ chief strategist makes time to hawk his book and take 45 minutes out on Monday for an interview with the New York Observer. 45 minutes, 8 days before the do-or-die primaries? Maybe because this guy has already taken over.

Penn isn’t running Hillary’s campaign anymore. He’s running to keep his day job as CEO of Burson-Marsteller.

The obits of the Clinton campaign - still way premature - keep flying in, and they’ve settled on something Bob Shrum has been saying since last November. The “I’m the most experienced” frame is a loser in a “change” year. And nothing guaranteed defeat more than Mr Microtrends, slicing and dicing to the nth degree. All trees, no forest. All science, no magic. All machine, no humanity.

Faced with this little gem in the Observer interview:

A source in the campaign, speaking on background, said that Mr. Penn’s philosophy was perfectly represented by a comment he made during one of Mrs. Clinton’s debate preps at campaign headquarters in early winter. About 15 staffers were in a room with Mrs. Clinton discussing how she could best respond to a particular line of attack. One of the aides, the source recalled, had an idea.

“I think you need to show a little bit of humanity,” said the aide.

Mr. Penn interjected. “Oh, come on, being human is overrated.”

“Everyone laughed and it broke the tension, and even he had a smile on his face,” said the source. “But it said a lot because it seemed to really encapsulate a viewpoint.”

Mark started testing out lines to deflect blame:

Mr. Penn, who recalled the comment as self-deprecating, was unrepentant about the campaign he had run, asserting that to the extent that his message was heeded, it was successful.

“I think that virtually every schoolchild knows that she is ‘ready on day one,’ said Mr. Penn, referring to one of the slogans he designed for Mrs. Clinton. “If you look back—at the beginning she was ‘ready for change and ready to lead’ and that’s something that built a large coalition that carried her through Super Tuesday. Between then and now, there was a period where the campaign didn’t have resources to play ahead in those states it needed to campaign in.”

As he put it, his strategy had succeeded in the “biggest message-oriented states.”

And, by implication, the political ground and money game, run by former campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle, her deputy Mike Henry and longtime Clinton loyalist and Penn foe Harold Ickes, ruined it for Mrs. Clinton in “organization-driven” states, where she suffered defeats in “a series of caucuses that generated tremendous momentum for Obama.”

Of course, if Mrs. Clinton was running all along as the change candidate, that was far from clear: Her early campaign slogans were “Renew the Promise of America” and “In to Win,” and they only gave way later to “Working for Change, Working for You.”

Even Mrs. Clinton’s campaign-rescuing win in New Hampshire seemed attributable to factors ranging far beyond any carefully constructed message, when she benefited from a surge of support following an extraordinary display of emotion at a campaign stop the day before the primary. (Mr. Ickes, a senior campaign adviser, has publicly pointed out more than once that even Mr. Penn was surprised by the result.)

Penn is going to have some explaining to do when it’s all over. Perhaps even to his employer. B-M owner WPP Group CEO Sir Martin Sorrell already has the one-line obit for Mark Penn’s reputation for wisdom, as relayed to Arianna Huffington:

“Mark Penn,” he told me the other night in Los Angeles, “literally wrote the book on microtrends, but this election is about a macrotrend.”

As a former WPP employee myself (B-M rival H&K, which I miss sometimes), I never met Sorrell but knew quite a few people who knew him quite well. Sir Martin enjoys a joke. But I’m not sure he wants one running part of his company.