Bill Clinton, the father of "the politics of personal destruction," called it "triangulation."
Triangulation was a political strategy that pitted one group against another on opposite sides of an important issue, and then Clinton would take the middle ground and be seen as the moderate compromiser.
He would often define opposing groups of people, putting people into boxes they never thought of themselves as being in, and then he would create an issue where the two groups were antagonistic to each other. Then Clinton would come in to resolve the conflict and be the hero.
The problem with triangulation was that after eight years of Clinton, the country was divided into factions that despised each other in ways that we had not seen before.
-PJ
They don't bother with "moderation" any more.