Triangulation: The Strategy I Love to Hate

[If] deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray--by the subtle signs of self-knowledge--the deception being practiced.

Robert Trivers wrote this sentence in the introduction to Richard Dawkins' influential The Selfish Gene, and it gives a genetic excuse for every earnest promise that has ever gone unfulfilled. Ladies, this is why that gentleman was able to say he loved you and then slept with your sister anyway - people have a capacity to mean things only when they say them in order to convince other people they believe them.

Casting around completely at random for an example to illustrate this, we could take a shot in the dark and hit Hillary Clinton. Clinton has a major problem admitting that her vote for the Iraq war was a mistake. Primary voters in New Hampshire seem to be especially displeased by this, as well they should.

So why won't Clinton just repudiate her stupid vote already and move on to enjoy her enormous structural advantage on the campaign trail? Apparently she thinks apologizing would be "a gimmick".

OK, fair enough. If she doesn't mean it, she shouldn't apologize. Such an apology would sound like the apology for resting your french fries on your brother's side of the back seat. But just as in the back seat, it's not that we want to hear her say "I'm sorry", it's that we want her to be sorry.

Quoth Clinton, “If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from.” As Kos trenchantly remarks, "Thank you, Hillary. I think I will."

There are plenty of ways for Clinton to get out of this situation without saying she's sorry. For example, she could use her genetically programmed excuse and say that it seemed right at the time but it was actually wrong. There, problem solved.

Trotting out her usual laundry list about why and how she was misled and did the right thing given the situation and blah and blah isn't going to cut it. Voting for the invasion of Iraq was a huge mistake. I opposed it from Day 1. So did Barack Obama. It was obvious (to me at least) that Bush and his cronies really had deceived themselves into believing that Iraq had to be invaded, but erasing the subtle signs of self-knowledge wasn't enough to convince me that the invasion was worth supporting.

What really nags at me about Clinton's refusal to say something straightforward is the presence of some subtle signs of self knowledge in her persona. One suspects that she knows that voting for the invasion was wrong, and she was just intimidated into going with the crowd by the jingoistic atmosphere and Bush's high approval ratings. But she won't admit it.

Even though John Edwards voted for the war resolution, he has completely and humbly retracted that vote. This tells me that if chose him from the other candidates, as Clinton would have me do, John Edwards would use better judgment next time. I don't see that from Clinton.

Shifting to the other side of the aisle, conservatives still hold Clinton to be public enemy #1. Her current position on the war, moderate as it is, simply isn't ludicrous enough to convince any right winger that the sexual threat she represents can be overlooked. To wit, the smash and grab artists who were behind the bogus swift boat attacks on John Kerry are now trying to figure out how they can baselessly smear Clinton the same way.

Clinton is a strong girl who can take of herself, and she's been public enemy #1 for so long that there isn't going to be any new dirt on her. Without new dirt, the same old attacks will (a) not pique much media coverage and (b) fail to turn anyone against her who doesn't already hate her. So whatever further conservative attacks she suffers, she has nowhere to go but up. But the conservative opinion thus identified underscores the larger problem: triangulation.

Clinton is taking two very distant ideological points and creating a third point in the middle. The assumption of this strategy is that public opinion will be distributed maybe 20% strongly left and 20% strongly right with the two sides fighting over the 40% in the middle. Therefore, says the strategy, if any one candidate could appeal directly to that middle, he or she would have an instant plurality.

But in the case of Iraq, strong majorities oppose the occupation under every formulation. And here the main problem with triangulation emerges: by trying to appeal to some sort of middle, Clinton is left with no friends. People on the left hate that she won't own up to her misjudgments, and people on the right hate her because they're bitter, hateful people.

Some centrists might conclude that they like her style, but passionate people, the kind of people who will really go to bat for you, believe in things. They won't accept "maybe" for an answer.