Sen. Clinton believes abortion is sad. She wants folks on both sides of the Roe v. Wade issue to work together to make it rare.
I agree. Pro-choice people should have been saying that years ago. In fact, I did.
But the timing of the Senator’s speech (a few days ago) suggests she is triangulating, positioning herself between two "extremes." She will do so on more issues as we approach 2008 So will most national Democrats.
Anything to avoid saying, "This is what I believe…."
They think Gore and Kerry lost because they were too "liberal."
Gore won, of course, but he lost a lot of voters who got the idea he had no core beliefs. That produced an election close enough to steal.
Kerry, too, was all strategy and no conviction. Or so he looked.
Triangulation is a tactic whose primary goal is to find a middle of the road position. As practiced by Bill Clinton, it’s accompanied by heavy polling to identify voters’ sympathies on various issues and what language they like.
Clinton then adopted the political positions – couching them in the pre-evaluated language – and stitched together a majority of those voters.
Clinton was lucky. Post-Clinton, in the era of True Believer Bush, that is a formula for keeping the GOP in power. (And since Bush governs from the Far Right, it guarantees that the middle will keep moving to the right.)
PS The January 31 edition of Newsweek reports that the leaders of the Democratic Party are engaged, once again, in an "Anybody But Dean" action, trying to keep the former Vermont governor from getting the job of chairman of the Democratic Party.
Not just the Washington powers, but Governors Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania and Bill Richardson of New Mexico are leading the drive to keep Dean from that job.
Political questions arise. Do they oppose Howard Dean because he speaks carelessly? Or is it because 1) he opposed the Iraq War from the outset, 2) he rallied lots of Democrats, many young, by expressing his anger at President Bush and 3) he flaunted his habit of balancing the budget in Vermont.
If 1),2) or 3), which scares the party Establishment the most – being unambiguous (and right) on Iraq, expressing anger or balancing the budget? Or all of the above?
Finally, a journalism question - our local newspapers have written thousands of words on Richardson lately. How come Newsweek had to tell us the game Richardson is playing within the party?