As you may have heard, Barack Obama continued his recent pattern of coded criticisms of Hillary Clinton by denouncing “triangulation and poll-driven politics,” which is being generally interpreted (not least by HRC’s camp) as an attack on her husband’s political tactics and alleged infidelity to progressive principles.
John Edwards has also attacked “triangulation” as part of a broader, yet still heavily-coded, criticism of the Clintons as representing an unprincipled Washington Establishment.
So with HRC’s top rivals both definining themselves in opposition to “triangulation,” it might be a good time to ask: what, exactly, does “triangulation” mean?
Outside politics, “triangulation” is used in geometry, electronics, and gunnery as a general term for locating an object through reference to two fixed points.
In politics, “triangulation” is identified with the 1990s-era international Third Way movement generally, and with Bill Clinton specifically. And it’s pretty much agreed that the term was invented by Clinton advisor Dick Morris to describe the approach used by the Clinton-Gore campaign in its successful 1996 re-election campaign. Indeed, beyond Morris, no one associated with either Clinton has ever, so far as I am aware, used the term; it’s become entirely pejorative.
But what does it mean?
The AP story on Obama’s speech offered this definition: “His reference to triangulation, however, refers to Bill Clinton’s eight years as president when some advisers urged him to make policy decisions by splitting the difference on opposing views.”
Aside from the questionable suggestion that “triangulation” preceded and succeeded Dick Morris’ brief tenure as a Clinton strategist, I’m reasonably sure that anyone connected with Bill Clinton would angrily reject the idea that “splitting the differences” between the two parties was the essence of Clintonism. But the same argument has raged with respect to the related concept of “The Third Way,” which critics from both the Left and Rightviewed as an effort to appropriate conservative policy ideas and political messages, but whose advocates always maintained was an effort to refresh the Left with new policy ideas while refusing to concede whole issue-areas to the Right.
Going to the source himself, Dick Morris did an entire chapter on triangulation in his 2003 book, Power Plays. Here’s how he defined the term he made famous, as explained in a review of the book that I wrote at the time:

“The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other side’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.” Clinton, Morris shows, adopted the longstanding conservative goal of welfare reform as a top item on the Democratic agenda, but developed progressive policies, including higher funding for child care and stronger financial support for working families, to pursue that goal.

So according to Morris himself, triangulation isn’t about compromising on principles or policies, but about preempting conservative wedge issues by addressing them through progressive policies.
It’s no accident that Morris uses welfare reform as an example of triangulation. And so would many Democrats who prefer the pejorative definition of triangulation. Clinton’s 1996 decision to sign welfare reform legislation that a majority of House Democrats had voted against was at the time interpreted by some as a surrender to Republican principles and priorities, and by others as a redemption of his 1992 promise to “end welfare as we know it,” after a reshaping of the legislation (he vetoed two previous versions) to reflect much of his own approach to the issue. The real argument isn’t about Clinton’s subjective intentions, but about whether you think accepting a time limit for public assistance represented an unacceptable betrayal of progressive values, as some of Clinton’s own friends and advisors said at the time (though many have since recanted given the success of the initiative, and Clinton’s efforts after 1996 to eliminate some of the original bill’s restrictive provisions).
Another example of Clintonian “triangulation” you often hear of was his famous statement in the 1996 State of the Union Address that “the era of big government is over,” which a lot of conservatives treated as an ideological victory. But was it? Is “big government” essential to progressive governance? Or was Clinton’s argument that smaller but more efficient government was actually progressive defensible?
And a third example often cited was his advocacy for trade expansion, and particularly NAFTA (another issue where he was opposed by a majority of House Democrats, and by the labor movement). But whether NAFTA was right or wrong (and if anything, Democratic unhappiness with the agreement has increased since 1994), it’s hard to describe Clinton’s position as a “triangulating” surrender to the Right, since he was continuing a pro-trade Democratic tradition that dated back to Martin Van Buren, and included virtually every progressive luminary of the past.
What I’m driving at here is that differences of opinion about “triangulation”–its definition and its propriety–often come down to differences of principle, not differences between principled and unprincipled people. All of Clinton’s supporters and critics would agree that the conditions under which he governed–facing, for six of his eight years as president, a ruthless congressional Republican majority that eventually sought to remove him from office—excused some tactical flexibility. But is that all he represented?
In the end, maybe it no longer matters. Even if Obama and Edwards are attacking a disputable definition of triangulation that may not be historically accurate, I think we’d all agree that we don’t want a Democratic nominee for president who is unprincipled and entirely poll-driven. That’s why I agree with those who encourage HRC’s critics to get more specific, drop the code words, and take on her actual policies as evidence of her actual philosophy. And that’s particularly true of a candidate who has previously defined himself as representing a new generation of progressives who want to get over the tired arguments of the 1990s.

I’m sure Matt Compton will do a more definitive post on the subject here directly, but I wanted to draw your attention to the Washington Post story today about the Ron Paul Phenomenon: the eccentric presidential campaign that’s almost entirely internet based (70 percent of his impressive money haul was raised online).
While the piece (by Jose Antonio Vargas) provides a useful summary of the Paul campaign, it does include one real howler that I’m surprised got by the editors:

There are shades of Howard Dean here, the way the insurgent Democratic candidate embraced the Web in 2003. And shades of McCain, too. The Arizona senator raised $1 million in two days online in 2000 after beating Bush in the New Hampshire primary.
But the most fitting analogy, political analysts here say, might be Patrick Buchanan. Though Paul has not been a general in the culture wars like Buchanan, both men come from the old right of the GOP, pols who champion limited government and fiscal conservatism. Buchanan was barely registering in the New Hampshire polls months before his surprise defeat of Bob Dole in 1996.

In his blind-men-describing-the-elephant approach to Paul, Vargas does not appear to realize that Ron Paul, far from representing the “old right,” is a libertarian. He was the Libertarian Party nominee for president in 1988, and spoke at that party’s national convention as recently as 2004. (The Libertarian nominee in 2004, Michael Badnarik, has endorsed Paul this year). His obsessive support for a return to the gold standard, for repudiation of international institutions and agreements, for wholesale abolition of federal agencies, for junking the “war on drugs,” and for elimination of overseas military commitments, are all libertarian boilerplate positions. Maybe Vargas was thrown by Paul’s extremist anti-abortion views, which are not characteristic of most libertarians (though as Grover Norquist once shrewdly observed, while all anti-statists believe abortion should be a matter of individual choice, they disagree about how many individuals are involved in the decision).
But confusing Paul with Buchanan, a man whose ideological lodestars are early-nineteenth-century Whiggery and early-twentieth-century Catholic Corporatism, just because both have opposed wars in Iraq, is a bit like identifying John Edwards with Tom Tancredo because both favor repeal of No Child Left Behind.
Once Paul’s libertarian identity is understood, his Net Power isn’t that mysterious. From the beginning, libertarians have always had a wildly disproportionate presence on the Internet. I learned this personally way back in the late 1990s, as I reported more recently in a New Donkey post:

I used to do a regular column for an e-zine called IntellectualCapital that posted comments after every article. It didn’t matter what I wrote about; within two comments the threads invariably degenerated into an intra-libertarian food fight over slavery-as-a-contract or privatizing the sidewalks or Ayn Rand’s Epistle to the Californians, or whatever.

The Post story sparked a fun exchange between Kate Sheppard and Ezra Klein over at TAPPED, wherein Kate wonders if Paul’s inability to turn all this cyber-juice into votes is a function of the Net-deadening Iowa Factor, and Ezra responds that crazy people are far better at creating blogospheric buzz than in attracting actual voters.
Just my point. The Internet is a tool that can be used by anybody, but is best used by people who actually represent a mainstream point of view.

A lot of Democrats were probably amused late last week when Mitt Romney, in a speech in Nevada, said he was speaking for “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” He was obviously adapting Howard Dean’s famous slogan (which actually originated with the late Paul Wellstone) of representing “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”
Aside from illustrating a certain lack of originality in Mitt’s speechwriting shop, the line has been broadly interpreted as being a shot at Rudy Giuliani’s heterodoxy on cultural issues, and (viz. John McCain’s derisive response) probably a mistake, given Romney’s own history of recently repudiated moderation and bipartisanship.
But I suspect this is a theme that Romney will continue to use, because it has an anti-Washington subtext that goes beyond its utility in savaging Rudy.
Let’s remember that Dean’s campaign was less an ideological crusade (aside from his opposition to the Iraq War) than a vehicle for the steadily growing belief of many Democrats that their representatives in Washington had lost touch with both progressive principles and the sentiments of rank-and-file party members. And Dean’s own credibility as the leader of a “people-powered movement” owed relatively little to his own record as a centrist, bipartisan governor of Vermont (as Dick Gephardt’s campaign was quick to point out on the campaign trail in Iowa). But the fact that he was a governor untainted by the alleged culture of cowardly compromise in DC was the only credential he really needed.
Anti-Washington appeals have an ancient provenance in Republican politics. It was an important part of George W. Bush’s message in 2000 and of Ronald Reagan’s message in 1980 and 1976. And going back much further, the idea that there was an evil and corrupt “Eastern Establishment” in the GOP that consistently betrayed rank-and-file conservatives was central to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 insurgency, and to Robert Taft’s 1940, 1948 and 1952 campaigns.
While most Democrats (myself included) think of the current, Washington-based GOP as faithfully reflecting the natural consequences of conservative ideology in power, there’s a powerful psychological need among conservatives to believe otherwise. The overwhelming consensus intepretation of the 2006 debacle on the Right was that Bush and his congressional allies “went native” in Washington and betrayed their conservative principles, refusing to rein in spending, embracing an immigration amnesty and a Medicare expansion in the pursuit of swing voters, and (pre-surge, at least) failing to go all out for victory in Iraq.
As it happens, there’s no 2008 Republican candidate (with the possible exception of the severely underfunded Mike Huckabee) who is the natural vehicle for this revisionist take on the GOP’s past, present and future. So Romney’s exploiting the void, and can be expected to continue this effort.
I wouldn’t want to push any Dean-Romney parallelism very far. Unlike Dean, Romney does not “own” any key galvanzing issue. Unlike Dean, Romney does not possess any new movement-building tool for creating an army of supporters to lead (unless you think his campaign’s alleged mastery of “microtargeting” qualifies as a pale reflection of Dean’s internet-based juggernaut). And unlike Dean, Romney’s running a slick and highly professional campaign that does not exactly ooze rough-edged authenticity.
But unless and until some other candidate can seize the anti-Washington, anti-centrist mantle, don’t be surprised if Mitt keeps calling himself the leader of the “Republican Wing of the Republican Party.”
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

If, as appears very likely, Al Gore soon pours icy water on efforts to draft the Nobel Laureate for president, you can expect Gore enthusiasts to begin talking about a different scenario, in which a deadlocked Democratic Convention turns to the former vice president as a unity candidate. And just today, Kevin Drum revived blogopsheric talk that the many vulnerabilities of just about everyone in the Republican presidential field could produce a brokered convention there as well (John Judis made a more specific case for that possibility last month). So it’s as good a time as any to weigh in definitively on the possibility of an uncontrolled nominating convention (particularly on our side), and what that would mean.
First, let’s take the necessary look at history. The last multi-ballot convention was the Democratic event in 1952 (unless you count the multi-ballot Veep contest in 1956), long before the widespread emergence of primaries. The last convention when no candidate arrived without a clear majority of delegates was in 1976, when Gerald Ford needed a last-minute capture of the Mississippi Delegation to beat Ronald Reagan.
There have been two Democratic conventions in the modern era when extensive unhappiness with a putative nominee fed convention procedural fights aimed at unlocking committed delegates. In 1972, an Anybody-But-McGovern alliance of defeated candidates sought unsuccessfully to overturn California’s winner-take-all delegate selection rule, which would have seriously undermined McGovern’s convention majority. And in 1980, when Jimmy Carter’s approval ratings fell into the teens (and after he lost virtually every late primary to Ted Kennedy), there was an unsuccessful effort to make all delegates free agents.
Since 1980, the closest thing we’ve seen to any real political drama in a nominating convention was in 1988, when Jesse Jackson secured a prime speaking slot in exchange for a robust endorsement of Mike Dukakis, and perhaps in 1996, when Bob Dole disclaimed the abortion language in his party’s platform.
So recent precedents don’t offer any evidence supporting a truly deliberative convention, and the question becomes: is there anything about the dynamics of this particular presidential cycle that could turn everything upside down?
There are, as it happens, three developments that could theoretically produce a situation in which no candidate has a stable majority going into the convention: (a) the radical front-loading and compression of the primary calendar, which under some scenarios could turn inconclusive early results into a total delegate count with no majority; (b) a subsequent lengthening of the period between delegate selection and the conventions, which increases the odds of a scandal or major gaffe striking the putative nominee and producing widespread “buyer’s remorse” prior to the formal nomination; and (c) the emergence of candidates (HRC and Obama among Democrats, and Giuliani and Romney among Republicans) whose financial resources are so large that they might be able to survive early setbacks and harvest enough delegates to keep the ultimate outcome in doubt, with a few breaks along the way.
So far I’ve been talking about both parties, but there are D and R variables that might affect prospects for a brokered convention. Republicans have gone less thoroughly towards the proportional delegate awards that might help strong second-place candidates keep hope alive, particularly in mega-events like the February 5 lollapalooza. And Democrats have Super-Delegates, the guaranteed spots for elected officials–more than a quarter of total delegates–who cannot be legally bound to candidates.
On this last point, Chris Bowers has plausibly argued that Super-Delegates are likely to put a kibosh on any late challenge to a Democratic front-runner. But it’s just as plausible that the Supers could tilt decisively against a front-runner who looks like a general election loser.
And all in all, I do think that the most likely of the unlikely scenarios for a brokered convention is one that involves a deeply wounded Democratic proto-nominee with a small majority of elected delegates whose weakness creates a revolt among Super-Delegates.
If that were to happen–and this is the one point I hope readers take away from this post–it’s important to understand that the infrastructure of national political conventions these days is completely incompatible with a return to a highly divisive, much less deliberative, event. Having worked in the script-and-speechwriting shops of the last five Democratic conventions, I can tell you that the whole show is a floating quadrennial operation that is turned over to the nominee and his or her staff, who exercise totalitarian control over every detail. The rules, platform, scheduling, and messaging functions of latter-day Conventions have long lost any independent status or power, as everything has been subjected to the relentless effort to utilize ever-shrinking media coverage to move general-election opinion polls a few points. I can’t even imagine how a convention could be planned and executed without a candidate in charge. And though I’m less familiar with Republican conventions, it’s reasonably clear they have become even more ruthlessly controlled (viz. the GOP’s decision in 2004 to kill most of the meaningless afternoon sessions that offered hundreds of elected officials and interest group poohbahs a brief moment of CSPAN coverage).
If it looks like either party is drifting towards a brokered convention in 2008, a lot of difficult decisions will have to be made to avoid total chaos. On the other hand, total chaos could at least boost those terrible convention television ratings, and maybe even make conventions matter again.

There’s a useful new poll out, done by Celinda Lake’s firm for One Voice PAC, on public attitudes towards funding for the Iraq War.
In addition to the usual options of voting unconditionally for or against Bush’s supplemental appropriations request, this poll’s “third option” is worded a bit differently than most. Instead of messing around with timetables or dollar figures that probably don’t mean a lot to people, the poll tests support for the appropriation with the stipulation that funds can only be used to protect U.S. troops and contractors and withdraw them from Iraq. Overall, that option gets 47 percent support, compared with 22 percent for an unconditional denial of appropriations, and 23 percent for unconditional approval.
These findings, of course, still suffer from the fundamental problem that the only way Congress can “get to” the third option is to vote against any appropriations, and slug it out with Bush over a protracted period of time. If House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey has indeed delayed the moment of truth on Iraq funding until January, then maybe pollsters can figure out a way to test that scenario. In any event, this poll indicates pretty decisive overall opposition to anything like a indefinite continuation of the war, with independent voters aligned much more closely with Democrats than with Republicans.
Lake released not only a poll, and a memo, but 200 pages of crosstabs. You can slog through them, or look at Paul Rosenberg’s summary over at OpenLeft. (On the regional splits, BTW, Rosenberg misreads a verticle for a horizontal crosstab, and concludes that support for unconditional funding is more than three times as high in the South as in the Northeast. Actually, the regional disparities are a lot smaller, with unconditional funding supported by 15% in the Northeast, 24% in the Midwest, 25% in the South, and 20% in the West.)

The staff post earlier today on the methodology and internals of the Des Moines Register‘s Iowa Poll led me to this rather startling discovery about the poll’s picture of the demographics of likely Democratic caucus-goers: Only 2 percent are under the age of 25, while 51 percent are over the age of 55.
Two percent under 25? Is that possible? Does the poll assume that Caucus Night will coincide with big episodes of Heroes or Grey’s Anatomy?
Given these numbers, the really amazing thing about the Iowa Poll results is that Barack Obama is still within striking distance of HRC. And to flip the issue around, even if the percentage of Caucus-goers under 25 turns out to be twice as high as the Iowa Poll suggests, all the media stories about Obama’s robust campus-based support in Iowa have been apparently been goosing a ghost. You don’t count if you don’t vote.

As the Republican presidential candidates’ debate in Michigan yesterday illustrated, GOPers (with the partial exception of a confused-sounding Mike Huckabee) dutifully lined up in support of Bush’s veto of S-CHIP expansion legislation, defying both public opinion and the sensibilities of Sen. Charles Grassley, who happens to be from the first state in the nominating contest.
At the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus has a good write-up of where the candidates are, why they are there, and the price they may ultimately pay for treating a successful and highly popular health care program as “socialized medicine.”

Much of the content, on economic policies at least, of the Republican candidates’ debate in Dearborn (not Detroit, as I misrepresented it earlier today) this afternoon would have sounded perfectly normal twenty years ago. Lowering taxes, reducing regulations, and cutting public spending (in the abstract) are the eternal, divinely-established rules for growing the economy. Entitlement programs are out of control. Relentless optimism is America’s greatest economic asset. If you substitute “China” for “Japan,” even the hand-wringing of Hunter and Tancredo about trade sounded perfectly familiar. And Ron Paul’s lectures about monetary policy sounded a lot like those of Jack Kemp back in the day.
The one candidate who might have taken the debate in a different direction was Mike Huckabee, who likes to talk about economic inequality (not that he proposes to do anything about it other than a highly regressive national sales tax). But he was virtually ignored by the questioners for much of the debate, and then he strangely delivered his rap on pay disparities in the form of a warning to Republicans that people might resort to joining unions! (He also flubbed a chance to distinguish himself from the field on S-CHIP by refusing to say whether he would have vetoed the bill in Congress).
But beyond economic policy, the most alarming segment of the debate was the candidates’ answers to the question about whether a president should seek congressional authorization for military action against Iraq. With the obvious exception of Ron Paul, and the partial exception of Fred Thompson (who at least, by mentioning the War Powers Act, seemed to recognize there are some legal restrictions of executive military powers), the candidates all treated congressional authorization of military action as purely a matter of political expediency. Mitt Romney appeared to dismiss the constitutional issues by saying he’d “refer it to the lawyers.”
They are giving us all fair warning, folks.

The Republican candidates for president are gathering this afternoon in Detroit for a debate on economic issues sponsored by The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC (telecast live at 4:00 EDT on CNBC, and rebroadcast at 9:00 EDT on MSNBC). It ought to be an edifying show, in the sense of displaying that the conservative conquest of the Republican Party extends beyond national security adventurism and social-issues extremism.
Jonathan Chait has an op-ed in today’s New York Times reminding us that Republican fealty to the completely discredited supply-side theory of economics is at an all-time high. He singles out John McCain’s surrender to the supply-siders as exemplifying their iron control of the GOP:

Last year, Senator John McCain earned widespread ridicule for publicly embracing Jerry Falwell, whom he had once described as “evil.” But an equally breathtaking turnabout occurred earlier in the year, when Mr. McCain embraced the Bush tax cuts he had once denounced as an unaffordable giveaway to the rich. In an interview with National Review, Mr. McCain justified his reversal by saying, “Tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues.” It was the political equivalent of Galileo conceding that the Sun does indeed revolve around the Earth

The debate may showcase some ideas a lot nuttier than eternal life for Bush’s tax cuts. A Wall Street Journal article by Amy Schatz yesterday focused on Fred Thompson (who will be making his first candidate forum appearance in Detroit) and his views on tax policy. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but Schatz appeared to suggest that Fred’s main economic goal is to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in order to pay for a cut in corporate tax rates. Now that’s a vote-winner! (Fred also seems inclined to launch a trade war with the European Union–not usually thought of as the source of America’s biggest trade problems–by exempting exports from federal taxation).
So if you work at home or work for someone who doesn’t object to blowing two hours watching a bunch of old white men in suits speaking in the economic equivalent of The Unknown Tongue, you should check out today’s debate. It will provide a timely reminder that these guys live in a very different America than most of the rest of us.

Lots of progressive activists are agonizing about John Edwards’ campaign fundraising woes. But the more dramatic money saga is on the Right, where third quarter fundraising numbers appear to confirm that Mike Huckabee, for all of his yeasty ideological and personal qualities, just can’t raise the dough.
After all, Huckabee is almost perfectly positioned to finish second or third in Iowa. Were he to beat Fred Thompson there, he’d not only become the Hot Item in the Republican race, but would probably become the overwhelming favorite of the Christian Right. Moreover, he’d roll into New Hampshire touting a national sales tax plan that makes both corporate and “populist” conservatives drool. He’s got the rock band; he’s got the humor; he’s got the weight loss; he’s got the Kevin Spacey looks. He’s got every political insider in the hep world expecting him to make a move and keep the contest interesting.
As the old saying goes: If he had some ham, he’d make a ham sandwich, if he had some bread (pun intended).
With every imaginable realistic-longshot advantage, Huckabee raised about a million in the third quarter. By contrast, Ron Paul, whose only real function in the campaign is to ensure that candidate debates don’t sound like a jingoistic echo chamber on Iraq, raised five times that much. Ol’ Fred raised nine times that much. And though we haven’t seen Sam Brownback’s numbers yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if the doomed Kansan outraised Huckabee.
Unless something changes real fast, Huckabee’s campaign will become a talking point in every professional fundraiser’s pitch to future political campaigns.