Iowa is too close to call and Hillary Clinton could pull it out. But things don’t look good for her. Kucinich is throwing his support to Obama, as is Richardson, and, perhaps, Biden. That’s enough to make me revise my prediction from yesterday. I now believe Obama will win tonight. Edwards will come in second. If I’m right, the explanation will be, as Robert Novak notes, premature triangulation. And the main culprit? Mark Penn.
Sen. Hillary Clinton faces tonight’s Iowa caucuses not as the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee but seriously challenged by Sen. Barack Obama, thanks in no small part to committing a strategic error: premature triangulation. The problem is reflected in what happened to a proposal for a simplified, though far-reaching, health-care plan.
One longtime Democratic consultant, not involved in any campaign this time, suggested that Clinton propose a genuine universal health-care scheme. Everybody would be covered by Medicare, except people who chose to retain their private health insurance plans. The consultant gave the idea to somebody close to the senator, but the intermediary refused to pass it on to the candidate. He said it would never get beyond Mark Penn and his strategy of triangulation.
Penn, a professional pollster who was political adviser to President Bill Clinton, is chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He has embraced the triangulation — coming across as a third force somewhere between the liberal and conservative poles — that characterized Bill Clinton’s politics after 1994, based on advice from Dick Morris. To many Democratic operatives, Penn’s triangulation prematurely introduced a general election strategy when in fact the party nomination was still in doubt.
We could also call this a ‘premature sell-out to corporate interests’ or a ‘premature Republicanism’ or ‘imprudent honesty in marketing’. But whatever we call it, it ain’t very popular among progressive Democrats. I await a crushing Team Clinton defeat with almost the same eagerness I anticipated the drubbing of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primaries. C’mon Iowans…drive a silver stake into the beast.
