Catamaran Politics

Catamaran: two hulls joined by a frame

The image to the right is a picture of (a military version of) a catamaran. It is from this Wikipedia article, which defines the catamaran as "a type of boat or ship consisting of two hulls joined by a frame."

oldstyleliberal defines "catamaran politics" as a habit of preferring, as it were, the frame to the hulls. Think of the hulls as the ideological right and left wings; it doesn't matter which hull represents which ideological wing. The object of catamaran politics is to keep the ship of state perfectly balanced over the two wings.

President Bill Clinton was a master of catamaran politics — which have also been called "triangulation" and "Third Way liberalism" — especially in his approach to reforming welfare. Political pundit Joe Klein writes of the topic in "Three Cheers for Triangulation: What Lieberman's primary defeat means," in a recent issue of Time magazine:

... [Clinton's] philosophy was both successful and profound. It proposed the achievement of liberal ends through market-oriented conservative means. Welfare reform, which combined a work requirement with significant financial incentives for the working poor, was the best example of how the philosophy might work. Unfortunately, Monica Lewinsky's thong show prevented further successes — and Al Gore and John Kerry foolishly sidled away from the Third Way, toward the [Democratic] party's electorally lethal special-interest groups.

Another name for what I'm calling catamaran politics, says Klein, is "bipartisan moderation — which has the additional advantage [over the extremism of either political wing] of being the highest form of patriotism and the only route to victory in a time of war."

Klein says the defeat of three-term Democratic senator Joe Lieberman in the recent Connecticut primary, at the hands of Ned Lamont, an anti-Iraq War candidate, set off a war of words between Lamont-supporting "blognuts" of the left and Bush administration "wingnuts" of the right. The latter were led by Vice President Dick Cheney, "the nation's wingnut in chief," who "actually said Lieberman's defeat would give aid and comfort to our terrorist 'adversaries and al-Qaeda types'."

The former, repesented by "Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org and therefore, perhaps, the nation's blognut in chief," gloated about Lieberman's loss as the "death of triangulation."

If Pariser is correct, it's bad news, writes Klein:

It was Bush's disastrous decision to go to war — and worse, to go to war with insufficient resources — that transformed Iraq into a terrorist Valhalla. It is Bush's feckless prosecution of the war that has created the current morass, in which a U.S. military withdrawal could lead to a regional conflagration. [Bush political strategist Karl] Rove may avert another electoral embarrassment this November with the same old demagoguery, but his strategy has betrayed the nation's best interests. It has destroyed any chance of a unified U.S. response to a crisis overseas. Even the Wall Street Journal's quasi-wingnut editorial page cautioned, in the midst of a typical anti-Democratic harrumph, "[No] President can maintain a war for long without any support from the opposition party; sooner or later his own party will begin to crack as well."

Accordingly, "the essential felony of the Bush White House [is] that it has tried to run a war without bipartisan support." Bush spurns catamaran politics at a time when Clintonian deftness is sorely needed.

So, too, does the far left wing of Clinton's own party. Alas and alack.