For Hillary, it's Triangulation 2.0

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PHILADELPHIA — Bill Clinton won re-election in 1996 by employing a strategy dubbed "triangulation," essentially running against both Republicans and Democrats.

In 2007, Hillary Rodham Clinton is running for president with what might be called Triangulation 2.0. It is one of the most vivid examples of how the successful Clinton machine of the 1990s is being replicated in 2007.

Throughout the '90s, Bill Clinton befuddled, angered, discombobulated and wearied his opponents. Now, in perhaps the most consequential election in several generations, New York Sen. Clinton is again trying to take advantage of a triangle position against both Republicans and Democrats.

Advised by some of the same strategists of '96, the most famous politician in the field is running as an agent of change, fending off escalating attacks from fellow Democrats who see her as elusive and unelectable, and Republicans who see her as a slippery relic from bitter political fights of the 1990s.

In one of the most familiar scripts of the last 16 years, Clinton Inc. has reconstituted into the most formidable infrastructure of money, advice and raw political ability in the '08 race. She has run a relentless campaign designed to portray herself heading toward an inevitable rendezvous with history as the first woman president, the first spouse of an ex-president to become president and as a woman running in her own triangle: as de facto incumbent, heir apparent and change agent all rolled into one.

Can it work? Will another national campaign with a Clinton at center stage — and all of its fascinating, confounding and yes, wearying aspects — be good for the country? Can a 35-year veteran of politics, one with self-admitted political scars, in the final analysis be the change agent she says the country yearns for?

All these questions were on display in a fascinating debate here Tuesday night and in the political backwash that followed. It was not a city of brotherly — or sisterly — love, and it may have been a preview of what we might expect if Sen. Clinton runs the table of primaries and caucuses in January on her way to the Democratic nomination Feb. 5.

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One of Clinton's most damaging moments of the '08 campaign so far came when she gave an evasive and contradictory answer to a question about whether she favored New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's proposal to grant illegal immigrants driver's licenses. Fairly or not, it rekindled her husband's penchant for parsing — most famously over the definition of "is" in the Monica Lewinsky scandal — that earned him the nickname "Slick Willy." And her opponents in the triangle pounced.

Edwards accused Clinton of saying "two different things in the course of about two minutes." Obama, warming to an attack mode he had seemed reluctant to embrace, said he couldn't tell whether Clinton was for or against the idea. Leadership, he said, "is not just looking backwards and seeing what's popular or trying to gauge popular sentiment."

This column has predicted for months that "electability" would infuse both political parties' nominations, in a big way, in 2008. That is coming through loud and clear roughly two months before the real voting begins.

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