Doug
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Let me give respective examples of the practice and theory of triangulation. The practice was captured vividly in a 1999 essay by Robert Reich, Clinton's first-term secretary of labor and one of the small core of liberal policy makers to have been a "Friend of Bill" or FOB since the halcyon Rhodes Scholarship days of 1969. Mr. Reich here reminisces on the Cabinet discussions he attended in 1996, when the Clinton administration decided to remove many millions of mothers and children from the welfare rolls:
<block quote> When, during his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton vowed to 11 end welfare as we know it" by moving people "from welfare to work," he presumably did not have in mind the legislation that he signed into law in August 1996. The original idea had been to smooth the passage from welfare to work with guaranteed health care, child care, job training and a job paying enough to live on. The 1996 legislation contained none of these supports-no health care or child care for people coming off welfare, no job training, no assurance of a job paying a living wage, nor, for that matter, of a job at any wage. In effect, what was dubbed welfare "reform" merely ended the promise of help to the indigent and their children which Franklin D. Roosevelt had initiated more than sixty years before. </block quote>
That is indeed how many of us remember the betrayal of the poor that year. Now here's Reich again, detailing the triangulation aspect of the decision:
<block quote> In short, being "tough" on welfare was more important than being correct about welfare. The pledge Clinton had made in 1992, to "end welfare as we know it," and "move people from welfare to work," had fudged the issue. Was this toughness or compassion? It depended on how the words were interpreted. Once elected, Clinton had two years in office with a Congress controlled by Democrats, but, revealingly, did not, during those years, forward to Congress a bill to move people from welfare to work with all the necessary supports, because he feared he could not justify a reform that would, in fact, cost more than the welfare system it was intended to replace. </block quote>
So, as Mr. Reich goes on to relate in excruciating detail, Mr. Clinton - who was at that stage twenty points ahead in the opinion polls - signed legislation that was more hasty, callous, short-term, and ill-considered than anything the Republicans could have hoped to carry on their own. He thus made sure that he had robbed them of an electoral issue, and gained new access to the very donors who customarily sent money to the other party. (Mr. Reich has good reason to remember this episode with pain. His own wife said to him, when he got home after the vote: "You know, your President is a real asshole.") Yet, perhaps because of old loyalties and his Harvard training in circumlocution, he lacks the brisk ability to synthesize that is possessed by his spouse and also by the conservative theorist David Frum. Writing in Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard of February 1999, Mr. Frum saw through Clintonism and its triangulations with an almost world-weary ease:
<block quote> Since 1994, Clinton has offered the Democratic party a devilish bargain: Accept and defend policies you hate (welfare reform, the Defense of Marriage Act), condone and excuse crimes (perjury, campaign finance abuses) and I'll deliver you the executive branch of government ... Again since 1994, Clinton has survived and even thrived by deftly balancing between right and left. He has assuaged the Left by continually proposing bold new programs-the expansion of Medicare to 55 year olds, a national day-care program, the reversal of welfare reform, the hooking up to the Internet of every classroom, and now the socialization of the means of production via Social Security. And he has placated the Right by dropping every one of these programs as soon as he proposed it. Clinton makes speeches, Rubin and Greenspan make policy; the Left gets words, the Right gets deeds; and everybody is content. </block quote>
I wouldn't describe myself as "content" with the above, or with those so easily satisfied and so credulous that they hailed the welfare bill as a "tough decision" one year, and then gave standing ovations to a cornucopia of votepurchasing proposals in the "Lewinsky' budget that confirmed Frum's analysis so neatly a week after it was written. He is right, also, to remind people of the Defense of Marriage Act, a straight piece of gaybaiting demagogy and opportunism which Clinton rushed to sign, afterwards purchasing seventy separate 11 spots" on Christian radio stations in order to brag about the fact. Nobody on the Left has noticed, with Frum's clarity, that it is the Left which swallows the soft promises of Clinton and the Right that demands, and gets, hard guarantees.
Clinton is the first modern politician to have assimilated the whole theory and practice of "triangulation," to have internalized it, and to have deployed it against both his own party and the Republicans, as well as against the democratic process itself. As the political waters dried out and sank around him, the president was able to maintain an edifice of personal power, and to appeal to the credibility of the office as a means of maintaining his own. It is no cause for astonishment that in this "project" he retained the warm support of Arthur Schlesinger, author of The Imperial Presidency. However, it might alarm the liberal-left to discover that the most acute depiction of presidential imperialism was penned by another clever young neoconservative during the 1996 election. Neatly pointing out that Clinton had been liberated by the eclipse of his congressional party in 1994 to raise his own funds and select his own "private" reelection program, Daniel Casse wrote in the July 1996 Commentary.
<block quote> Today, far from trying to rebuild the party, Clinton is trying to decouple the presidential engine from the Congressional train. He has learned how the Republicans can be, at once, a steady source of new ideas and a perfect foil. Having seen where majorities took his party over the past two decades, and what little benefit they brought him in his first months in office, he may even be quietly hoping that the Democrats remain a Congressional minority, and hence that much less likely to interfere with his second term. </block quote>
Not since Walter Karp analyzed the antagonism between the Carter-era "Congressional Democrats" and "White House Democrats" had anyone so deftly touched on the open secret of party politics. At the close of the 1970s, Tip O'Neill's Hill managers had coldly decided they would rather deal with Reagan than Carter. Their Republican counterparts in the mid-1990s made clear their preference for Clinton over Dole, if not quite over Bush. A flattering profile of Gore, written by the author of Primary Colors in the New Yorker of October 26, 1998, stated without equivocation that he and Clinton, sure of their commanding lead in the 1996 presidential race, had consciously decided not to spend any of their surplus money or time in campaigning for congressional Democrats. This was partly because Mr. Gore did not want to see Mr. Gephardt become Speaker again, and thus perhaps spoil his own chances in 2000. But the decision also revealed the privatization of politics, as did the annexation of the fund-raising function by a president who kept his essential alliance with Dick Morris (a conservative Republican and former advisor to Jesse Helms) a secret even from his own staff.