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.
I think the big deciding factor will be if Clinton is aware that liberal policy is in of itself good policy.
Like, I can understand Bill Clinton’s triangulation and centrist rhetoric from the perspective that it was really the best that we could get. This was a world in which fucking Ralph Reed held the nation by the balls and the violent crime wave was just starting to significantly fall and and level of gaybashing that didn’t directly lead to murder or maiming was cool. I can forgive him for nonsense like school uniforms and three strikes and welfare reform and flag burning amendments because he lived in a different world.
However, what I am concerned about is to what extent Hillary Clinton and Democrats in general go in getting high off of their own supply. Obama really did believe in that centrist nonsense. You don’t sabotage your economic recovery with an inadequate stimulus and bargaining on the debt ceiling unless you truly believed that freshwater garbage about deficits and balanced budgets and blah de blah. Obama’s administration would’ve been the perfect time to kick much (though certainly not all) of that centrist garbage to the curb but because Dems of that era truly believed in what they were peddling it led to disaster.
Hillary Clinton is being cagey so it’s hard to get a read on whether the centrist gestures Democratic politicians of her generation were just soothing bromides made to settle Traditional America’s neuroses (which I can forgive) or she really does believe that the surpluses of Bill Clinton were a great thing and we need to get some of that going again (which I can’t).
Surpluses are nice once you’ve covered necessary spending. Deficits all through the business cycle are like driving your car with the throttle always wide open. You’re going to crash. And it’s the 1% who have access to inflation protected investments.
People forget that Keynes did call for surpluses, when the business cycle got to hot & frothy.
Bush was handed a fine economy (will underlying structural flaws thanks to the trade agreements). Bush’s tax cuts exacerbated income inequality and pushed the pedal to the floor. The Iraq war was downshifting. The crash became inevitable. Perhaps greed will always lead to crashes as businessmen rationalize cutting the golden goose open because “it’s different this time”, when the only thing that’s different is that it’s their turn to pillage the economy.
No. Unless you’re wracked with extreme inflation, surpluses are a very bad thing in a system with fiat money. Surpluses take money out of the private sector and thus create an artificial ceiling on growth. There’s a reason why federal surpluses are almost perfectly correlated with recessions.
In the nearly four score since Keynes wrote General Theory economists have done a lot of work since then.
By analogy: Darwin’s work was groundbreaking but it was also incomplete; in particular, modern evolutionary theory places much more of an emphasis on geographic isolation than he did.
Bush was handed a shit economy that he partially recovered from but then proceeded to fuck up in his own way. Yes, Bush made things worse in many ways such as income inequality and having a trade deficit with insufficient deficit spending. But it doesn’t change the fact that Clinton handed him a turkey and managed to escape most of the blame for it.
And this is why a Clinton Presidency makes me extremely nervous. The pressure on her to replicate the ‘success’ of her husband’s economic policy will be immense — and it’ll be guaranteed to cause a recession, with baffled leftists left holding the bag and struggling for some asinine explanation why their policy failed. Will they be able to use the dotcom bubble burst explanation this time? Or will they get lucky enough to pass off that stink bomb to the Republican administration before it bursts?
Proving my point. “It’s different this time” and “It’s GOOD to drive with the pedal to the metal all the time.”
Yes, indeed. Let’s eliminate taxes entirely and just borrow from the FED at zero interest. They will always be willing, or the directors can be replaced with directors who are willing. Why is something telling me that that way leads to Zimbabwe.
I’m saying the exact opposite of ‘it’s different this time’. Surpluses in the United States are perfectly correlated with recessions, therefore we should never have surpluses unless there is a situation in which a fiscal contraction would be warranted. Which would be pretty much be high inflation despite having high interest rates. It’s people who think that the Clinton budgets were a thing to strive for are special pleading.
1.) While taxes in a monetarily sovereign government do not fund spending, they’re used for other things. Such as leveling income inequality or regulating certain types of social behavior. They’re also useful, if inefficient, at reducing inflation.
2.) Why does the federal government need to borrow anything to fund its expenses when it is monetarily sovereign? There are reasons for the government to borrow money rather than to create and spend it directly, but the idea that the United States needs to collect pre-existing moneys from the private sector or the nebulous ‘Chinese’ before it can spend it is an artifact of outdated gold standard thinking.
Evidence of the correlation:
http://www.epicoalition.org/docs/thayer.htm
And post-WW2:
And you know what else? This was published in friggin’ 1998! And guess what? Another freaking recession happened in 2000, just in time for Clinton to hand Bush the hot potato.
The Democrats are pretty fucking lucky that none of the stink of the Clinton budgets landed on them. We’re not going to get lucky like that a second time if Hillary Clinton believes this nonsense about ‘paying down our debts’ and ‘you can’t borrow forever!’
It is not universally true that deficits cause inflation. It might and it might not. It will depend on whether the economy is at full capacity and full employment and on the savings desires of the people. At full employment demand beyond capacity could trigger inflation but only if people do not choose to save more. There are some who feel that because of economic saving a deficit is always needed.
It should be pointed out that supply shocks that cause “inflation” are different and can occur without a deficit e.g. food shortages or oil monopolies.
“It is not universally true that deficits cause inflation. It might and it might not. It will depend on whether the economy is at full capacity and full employment and on the savings desires of the people.”
Exactly!
“Hillary Clinton is being cagey” I interpret this as being unsure which lies will get her more votes.
If I hear Hillary comparing our economy to a giant household or bragging about Bill’s surplus, I will know she has no clue on the economy. That makes here on a par with Obama. And if she shows a strong tendency to supply guns and arms to fight IS I will know she plans another freaking war. For the time being my support lies elsewhere. Time to fix our economy and get out of these endless and useless wars.
So I wasn’t yet in Highschool during the 96 campaign but I remember the uniforms thing and I wished we had uniforms bad, since it would obviate having to decide what to wear each day.
I grew up in a suburb that was heavily Polish, Italian and Irish. There was one public High School and two Catholic High Schools. The Catholics wore uniforms (and cool school jackets) so uniforms never seemed strange to me. I never thought they would solve crime, but back in the day, kids didn’t shoot other kids to steal their shoes.
Thanks for another terrific, thoughtful post.
In line with the notion of rewarding good behavior, I’ll just note that there are some encouraging signs from the Clinton campaign:
*support for automatic voter registration;
*attacking Republican “moderates” on immigration: “When they talk about legal status, that is code for second-class status.”; and
*support for paid family leave;
to name a few.
As Brian Beutler on TNR observes, “Rather than vie for conservative support by inching rightward, Clinton is instead reorienting liberal ideas in ways that make the Republican policy agenda come into greater focus.”
Final note: I think all of this has less (not nothing, but less) to do with the personal opinions of Bill and Hillary Clinton (or any other politician) than it does with the circumstances in which they are operating. The broader and deeper the organized public support for a progressive political agenda, the more likely it is to win support from politicians.
P. S. As for foreign policy, I agree with Booman’s analysis. Clinton has, I think, a great opportunity to use her experience as Secretary of State as a pivot on a range of foreign and military policy issues. (“Taking office as Sec. of State in 2009, I saw firsthand how badly the previous administration had damaged America’s reputation with our allies and around the world, and how much that weakened our power to be a force for good. We need to send more of our young men and women abroad to work as diplomats, engineers, teachers, doctors, nurses, and Peace Corps volunteers and fewer of them as soldiers and sailors to fight and die in ill-conceived and executed wars as we saw under the Bush-Cheney administration.”)
I don’t know that she will, but the opportunity is there.
Politics is now about race because of the horror of having an entire black family in the White House. The Republicans have exploited this feeling to take control of both houses of congress and far too many state legislatures by making this a tribal issue that plays well into identity politics. While the people wallow in this racist quagmire the rich take everything. Hillary wants automatic voter registration but that would give a voice to “those people” and I suppose she wants to make this national. Did she forget about “states rights”. Brown is the new black so Hillary wants to expand immigration reform, even more than the hated Obama. Paid family is nice but the above issues override everything. Hillary falls flat because she plays into race.
The reality is that “those people” are becoming more and more people as the rich take everything. Instead of talking about race, how about talking about the 1% and how they have rigged the system to make everyone except themselves “those people”. The tribe is in trouble and deep down they know it. Tribal politics can be broken if the conversation turns to only issues. The conversation then turns from left versus right to up versus down where the 99% are the down. Hillary does not get it. Was Bernie cagey about TPP or his vote on the Iraq war? How many issues has Hillary given specifics to that poll positive with a majority of the people? Hillary could lose the general election to the worst Republican you can imagine.
Thanks for your comment, but American politics has always, to a large degree, been about race. The Republican party’s “Southern strategy” was adopted before Barack Obama was a teenager.
Since 1980 the Democratic presidential candidate has gotten roughly (give or take a few points) 40% of the white vote. That means, among other things, there are roughly 40% of white voters who either actively support candidates who campaign on issues that are “about race”, or who are willing to vote for those candidates regardless.
We agree that Clinton (or any other Democratic nominee) could lose next November, but most if not all of the issues she’s talked about in recent weeks are, in fact, issues that poll well, not only with Democrats but also with independents and swing voters.
As I watched the welfare reform triangulation at the time, it seemed to be trading a broken welfare system — anyone who saw it up close knew it was a perpetual band-aid on blatant discrimination and chronic underinvestment in workplaces — for a rhetorical end of welfare as we know it plus practical services that would lead to jobs in good times and expose the underinvestment in bad times. Transportation, training, child care, and other supportive services were real Democratic solutions. Republicans starved them into ineffectiveness, if not by the 2000 election, certainly rapidly afterward.
The problem is that it is possible to triangulate when goals are fixed. Conservative Republican goals always were conditioned on diadvantaging Democratic voters; they were not fixed. Triangulation became a moving capitulation to Republican tantrums. And Dick Morris was shown for what he was — a conservative betrayer of the Clintons.
Triangulation could be a one-off tactic. It fails as a long-term strategy exactly because it allows the other side to manipulate how far away from your own agenda you go.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley might have worked as triangulation had not Gramm doctored the post-approval text to exclude further regulation. That tying of the hands of regulators to meet changing situations led to the several meltdowns and allowed for sweetheart regulations.
Carter’s deregulation advisor has been proven to be wrong on every count and in every industry. And state regulation often cushioned the effects of triangulated regulation.
Triangulation did not work because beginning with the Newt Revolution in 1994, Republicans did not negotiate in good faith. Nor were they negotiating over policy.
Triangulation was never a policy tactic, it was an electoral tactic. The goal was to give the Republicans enough of their stated political goals to defuse their political support, but no more. It was, basically, a rearguard tactic to slow conservative, mostly Southern, Democrats from leaving the party.
It worked pretty well for Clinton and for a number of other Democrats up to 2010 whereupon racism flipped too many of the conservative Democrats and the strategy failed catastrophically. 2014 confirmed that it just doesn’t work anymore, to the point that even the consultants seem to have noticed.
At this point the swayable voters for Clinton are the voters to her left deciding whether to vote rather than the voters to her right deciding which party to vote for. She’s a smart politician and if we see any triangulation, it will be to her left. But, frankly, we’re not seeing that; we’re seeing her take solid and even daring liberal positions. She’s not giving the left the minimum necessary, she’s giving it everything she possibly can.
I don’t care if Clinton really feels liberal or whatever in her heart. All I care is that Clinton knows what side her bread is buttered on.
Centrist politics are bad. If you look at the policy of Democratic Presidents going back to FDR, every time they had a major policy debacle (except for FDR’s court packing) it stemmed from listening to the idiot centrists. Cut deficit spending during a depression? Antagonize the Soviets after the conclusion of WW2? Support anti-communist dictators from around the world? Squander American goodwill overseas with ridiculous invasions? Bungle stagflation by not raising interest rates/taxes while doing a huge fiscal expansion? Let yourself get addicted to Middle Eastern oil? Run up a surplus in the last years of your administration? Negotiate with the Republicans on the debt ceiling?
As much as centrists love punching hippies, they cannot ignore this one salient fact: the hippies are always right. I’m aware that before the Obama Coalition took shape that there had to be some intentional self-sabotage in order to appease the mouth-breathing centrists (dragging feet on civil rights, anti-communist warhawkery, limited gains on universal health care and welfare, etc.) the Democrats were beholden to. But the tides have shifted and if Hillary Clinton is still under the impression that it’s 1972 or even 1995, she’s got another thing coming.
Yes, except maybe for her position on TPP, which I don’t believe she’s stated yet. Thanks for that dicey issue Obama …
Otherwise it’s been very encouraging seeing her move leftward on DP, and particularly on voting rights.
I’m sure the Republicans will soon respond by referring to her and Bernie as the “two socialists running for president on the Democrat side.”
She’s stated in her book ISDS is a nonstarter. Otherwise she’s probably willing to accept it. My guess is her silence is based on the fact that she has supporters on both sides and doesn’t want to alienate people on either side. Supporting TPP as it stands will lose her a lot of grassroots support, but opposing it loses Obama and some big donor.
No guts. No bottom. An empty suit.
Good stuff, BooMan. Learned a lot.
Still very concerned about her neocon foreign policy. Don’t trust what she says. Only watch what she does. Deregulating Wall Street still seems to be her deal. Someone please show me her actual track record for getting things done. Am I wrong to think she’s all hat and no cattle here?
There’s been a lack of progressive leadership on FP to match the DP leadership Eliz Warren and Bernie Sanders have shown which has brought economic fairness issues front and center in the debate.
I can’t think of a single influential liberal in this country who’s been forcefully advocating an anti-neocon FP position. Chomsky and Chris Hedges have not made an impact on the national discourse in this area, though credit to Hedges for his principled stance and for his effort. Katrina Vanden Heuvel at The Nation has made only modest inroads in the MSM. She’s rather soft-spoken and low-key.
No major pols on our side have taken up the cause, or done so in a consistent manner. 99.9% of the time Bernie Sanders talks about domestic issues. I have no idea what he thinks about Ukraine/Russia or the developing tension in the Pacific between China and the US/Japan.
If this continues to be an election about domestic issues almost exclusively (excepting a re-hash about Hillary’s vote on Iraq), we are likely to see Clinton taking a safe status quo pro-Obama admin position (i.e., a little bit too neocon here, a semi-compensating center-left stance there).
Bernie Sanders is as much of a hawk as any of them, though perhaps to a less degree. He didn’t vote for Iraq. He did vote for the wars in the 1990’s. And he would never, ever, vote against a defense authorization bill because “but teh troops!!!”
If you vote against the war but vote for the spending, what is the difference?
Does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?