Hillary Clinton likes pollster Mark Penn. A lot. Like, $1,583,465.08 a lot. That's how much Clinton paid Penn in the third quarter of 2007, according to Ben Smith. (Barack Obama's guru, David Axelrod, got "only" $379,439.12.) So when Penn talks, politicos listen.

This morning was no exception. To celebrate Clinton's "Women Changing America" week, Penn met a large group of reporters for breakfast in Washington, D.C.--and came out with a couple of headlines. Here they are (via The Politico):

• Hillary can beat Giuliani because she already did it once before. "We started in New York about seven or eight [percentage points] behind; when he dropped out we were seven or eight ahead," said Penn, referring to polls from Clinton's 2000 Senate race against Giuliani. "We have gone through a cycle with Giuliani.

• A lot of Republican women will vote for Hillary in the general election, making her impossible to beat. "There's only so much tough-guy vote in the Republican Party," he said, adding that his internal polling shows that as many as 24 percent of Republican women would support Clinton in a general election "because of the emotional element of having a woman nominee."

Sounds peachy, no? Too bad Penn's spin is either inaccurate, incomplete or, because it's based on private polling, impossible to disprove.

As Smith has noted, Giuliani and Clinton were essentially tied when Giuliani was diagnosed with cancer and dropped out of the race. A Quinnipiac Poll released on May 16, 2000--three days before Giuliani withdrew--showed Clinton at 44 percent and Giuliani at 43. That's a statistically insignificant one point advantage for Clinton--not the "seven or eight" that Penn cited this morning. Couple that with the fact that "America's Mayor" will make a more formidable opponent in 2008 than the depleted pre-9/11 Giuliani of 2000, and Penn's "we did it once before" argument starts to look dangerously thin.

Then there's the women. Penn's numbers are private, but public numbers from the Washington Post/ABC poll show that "80 percent of Republican women said they definitely would not support Clinton if she were the Democratic nominee... [and] only 11 percent said they would vote for her in a general election match-up against Giuliani." For the record, that's less than half of Penn's 24 percent estimate. What's more, Al Gore in 2000 outperformed Clinton's numbers among Republican women by five points; Chuck Schumer's 2004 totals topped her 2006 results by 10; and, this year, GOP women are more willing to rule out Clinton than either Barack Obama or John Edwards, according to the Post.

As one unaffiliated Democratic pollster told me this afternoon, "[Penn's numbers] made me chuckle. So exact! 24 percent: not 23, not 25. Let's just say I'm a little dubious." 

That said, I'm writing about them. And you're reading. And that's why they pay Penn the big bucks.