Penn is refusing to part ways with Burson-Marsteller, and Clinton has not asked him to do so. In an interview, he said he was avoiding a role in overseeing the part of the company's practice that involved management-labor issues.
Penn said he also had invoked the company's "conscience clause," meaning that he would not work with particular clients "because of personal feelings on the issue."
"Look, I've not been anti-union in my work.... As a practical matter, this is not the kind of work that I've been doing," Penn said. "It's nothing that I've had any connection with since I started at Burson."
He was named CEO of the public relations giant in December 2005.
Penn is part of Clinton's inner circle, participating in daily 7:30 a.m. conference calls with campaign aides.
He also is president of Penn, Schoen & Berland, a market research firm that he founded in 1975 and that is now part of Burson's parent company, WPP Group. For its political consulting and polling work, Penn Schoen collected $273,000 from Clinton's campaign in the quarter that ended June 30, campaign finance records show.
"It's not unusual for political consultants to have other clients, or do other work in addition to their political work," said Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson. "There were questions raised about some of Burson-Marsteller's work, and Mark made it clear that he was going to recuse himself completely from any of the work in question, and he has done so."
The outside financial interests of political strategists can cause difficulties for a candidate. When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he insisted that his main advisor, Karl Rove, sell a political consulting firm Rove had founded, to ensure that Rove's loyalties were not divided.
Other candidates also rely on advisors who maintain independent careers. Gregory B. Craig, an unpaid foreign policy advisor to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), is a Washington lawyer who in 2000 represented the father of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy at the center of a custody battle between relatives who wanted to keep him in Miami and his father, who wanted to take him back to Cuba. As a White House special counsel, Craig also represented President Clinton in the 1998 impeachment case.
With thousands of clients, Burson-Marsteller has far-flung interests. Cintas spokeswoman Pamela Lowe said it was Cintas' main public relations agency, doing "a wide range of corporate communications for us."
