Clintons Suffer From Premature Triangulation
Penn, a professional pollster who was political adviser to President Bill Clinton, is chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's campaign. He has embraced the triangulation -- coming across as a third force somewhere between the liberal and conservative poles -- that characterized Bill Clinton's politics after 1994, based on advice from Dick Morris. To many Democratic operatives, Penn's triangulation prematurely introduced a general election strategy when in fact the party nomination was still in doubt.
Clinton was even more obviously engaged in triangulation in September, when she voted for a resolution declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. The other three Democratic senators seeking the presidential nomination -- Obama, Joseph Biden and Christopher Dodd -- all opposed the resolution on grounds that it would give President Bush a pretext for invading Iran (though Obama was not present for the vote). Clinton, while attacking Bush's Iraq policy, did not want to seem soft on Iran's Holocaust-denying president, who has vowed to destroy Israel.
By Robert D. Novak
http://www.washingtonpost.com