No doubt, triangulation is a dirty word when used in progressives’ mouths. And I think it’s one of the more commonly misunderstood political words. For me, it’s a pretty simple term if you’re willing to use it as it was first introduced by Dick Morris. Ed wants to emphasize one characterization of the term that Morris made in 2003: “The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other party’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.”
I can roll with that definition up to a point, but that puts all the weight on substance and policy. I don’t think you can do that for a simple reason. At heart, triangulation was a reelection strategy for Clinton in 1996. It’s come to mean more than that, and people apply it to Clinton’s 1992 campaign as well as to the whole guiding principle behind the Democratic Leadership Council, where Ed used to work. In a sense, you can also divide Clinton’s presidency into two parts, before the Gingrich Revolution and after, and argue that triangulation was an adaptation that Clinton made to having to deal with a Republican Congress.
Unless you know what you mean by the term, it’s pretty easy to wind up arguing over these kinds of distinctions. Ed seems to be saying that Clinton always had the instinct to address national concerns, even when they were primarily right-wing obsessions, by crafting left-wing solutions. And we could debate that, but it’s not really what I want to dispute.
As a reelection strategy, the idea was to pass welfare reform no matter how odious the bill was in its details, and then take credit for having passed welfare reform. By doing that, Clinton killed two birds with one stone. First, he took a major talking point away from the Republicans who were doing everything they could to force Clinton to veto the bill and break his campaign promise to reform welfare. Second, he made sure to take all the responsibility for passing the bill so that the GOP couldn’t get away with arguing that he only did it under duress and due to their pressure.
There were other components to triangulation that were even less substantive. Remember this from February 1996?
In the name of putting “discipline and learning back in our schools” President Clinton instructed the Federal Education Department today to distribute manuals to the nation’s 16,000 school districts advising them how they can legally enforce a school uniform policy.
“If it means that teen-agers will stop killing each other over designer jackets,” the President said in his weekly radio address, “then our public schools should be able to require their students to require school uniforms.” He repeated the theme in a series of appearances throughout the day, expanding on an idea he mentioned in passing in his State of the Union message.
When I think of triangulation, I definitely think about school uniforms. I thought it was the oddest thing to come out of Clinton’s administration and I couldn’t understand it at all until later when I learned about Dick Morris and his Rasputin-like influence over the campaign.
That it wasn’t merely a throw-away line in his State of the Union but was actually followed up on with speeches and instruction manuals tells you how massive a grip Morris had on Clinton in early 1996. There’s simply no universe in which school uniforms are a left-wing solution to youth violence. This wasn’t fixing anybody’s car and these weren’t our tools.
And the same State of the Union address in which Clinton introduced the school uniform lunacy was the one when he announced that “the era of Big Government is over.”
To understand this legacy, it’s important to keep in mind the context. The Republicans had taken over Congress in 1995. They were riding high. Clinton needed to blunt their momentum and their appeal, and Dick Morris had a strategy to do that that at least did not lose Clinton his bid for reelection. We’ll never know how Clinton would have fared if he’d taken more traditional and orthodox advice.
At the same time, we can’t treat triangulation as primarily a substantive and policy-driven phenomenon. It was first and foremost a defensive reaction to the sudden overturning of nearly a half-century of uninterrupted Democratic control of the House of Representatives along with the loss of control of the Senate. It was a rearguard action, a disciplined retreat, if you will, after the routing the Democrats took in 1994 and the disaster of HillaryCare going down in flames. The common wisdom at the time was that Clinton had been too liberal on guns, on gays, and on health care, and he was going to get punished for it in 1996. He brought in a Republican chief of staff and hired Dick Morris to try to save his ass and triangulation should be properly understood as an act of desperation.
It’s only when you widen the vista a bit–to take in Clintonism as originally conceived or if you include his second-term retroactively–that triangulation takes on these greater meanings and significance.
Obviously, Hillary Clinton isn’t going to be dealing with the Contract With America or worrying about Bob Dole. When people ask about her use of “triangulation” they necessarily mean something broader. When President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, that could have been seen as triangulation. NAFTA could be seen that way. The deregulation of banks and commodities could be seen that way. Clinton’s ultimate record on gay rights could be seen that way.
But the effort to pass a health care bill, the Family Leave Act, the assault weapons ban, the Brady Bill, and his first budget could not be seen that way.
When people ask whether Hillary will resuscitate the things about her husband’s presidency that we remember least fondly, they are really worried about foreign policy, trade policy, and financial deregulation. They want to know three things.
First, does she have liberal domestic priorities or does she want to steer some middle course on, for example, entitlement reform?
Second, will she sell us out and then take credit for doing so purely for her own political benefit?
Third, are we going to get a repeat of fiascos like the Iraq Liberation Act? Is she going to lead us into an unnecessary war?
So, we can probably ditch the word ‘triangulation’ and just focus on getting answers to those questions.
I know that Bernie Sanders, Lincoln Chafee, and Martin O’Malley will each attack the Clinton record from different angles, but they’ll be probing on these three main points.
From the early evidence, Hillary looks like she has no intention of giving them any ammunition, but the foreign policy side of things will remain tricky. Yes, she still has to explain her vote to invade Iraq, but more problematic for her is she’ll have to talk about current events and her willingness to use force to address a variety of simmering conflicts around the world.
If Democrats don’t like her answers, she could still have a problem.
