Hillary Clinton's Big Problem: Premature Triangulation

As long as she needs support from Democratic primary voters, Hillary Clinton will want to defer the media rewards of an all-out "Sister Souljah moment." Let's recall that in 1992, when Bill Clinton went out of his way to denounce the then-little-known rap singer Sister Souljah at a Rainbow Coalition conference, he'd already clinched the Democratic presidential nomination and was looking toward the general election.

Bill Clinton's triangulation gambit, using Sister Souljah as a prop for his calculated move to ingratiate himself with establishment pundits, had been foreshadowed by a Washington Post article that reported the day before: "Some top advisers to Clinton argue that ... he must become involved in highly publicized confrontations with one or more Democratic constituencies." The constituency that Clinton chose to polarize with was African-American activists.

These days, and from here to the horizon, there's no larger or more adamant Democratic constituency than the antiwar voters who want the U.S. military out of Iraq pronto. At this point, Hillary Clinton's pro-war position is far afield from the views of most grassroots Democrats.

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