LOOKING back, the rout seemed inevitable. As the president himself has conceded: “All the voters knew was that they didn’t yet feel more prosperous or more secure; there was too much fighting in Washington and we were in charge; and the Democrats were for big government.” Another lesson: “You can have good policy without good politics, but you can’t give people good government without both.” And another: “Because I had been preoccupied with the work of the presidency, I hadn’t organised, financed and forced the Democrats to adopt an effective national counter-message”. And another: henceforth, in mid-terms, “the side without a national message would sustain unnecessary losses”.

So said Bill Clinton in his memoirs when discussing the mid-term rout of the Democrats in 1994. Bill and Hillary were in fact much more shaken up than this. In her account of the story (“For Love of Politics”, Random House), Sally Bedell Smith says they reacted to the 1994 results “with a combination of bewilderment, self-pity, recrimination, anger, rationalisation and denial”. Bill summoned the political guru Dick Morris for advice, and Morris found Bill to be “surprisingly sullen and withdrawn from the staff that he bitterly referrred to as ‘the children who helped me get elected’”. Morris then worked secretly with the president, under the code name “Charlie”, planning the strategy that came to be known as triangulation that was eventually to get the better of the Republicans and secure Bill’s re-election two years later.

I rehearse this ancient history only to put into perspective the current spate of commentary on whether Barack Obama has it within him to react to his own mid-term setback by doing his own version of triangulation. Bill Clinton grabbed the Republicans’ most moderate policies and recast them as his own: a balanced budget, welfare reform, smaller and more efficient government, deregulation. That has fed an exaggerated perception that Mr Clinton was an opportunist willing to discard his values and turn on a dime. Haley Barbour said at the time that the president “shares with the hummingbird the amazing ability to turn 180 degrees in a wink”. George Stephanopoulos called triangulation “a fancy word for betrayal”. And yet history records that Clinton went on to achieve many things once he had won his duel with Newt Gingrich’s Republican House.

As to whether President Obama can pull off the same trick, there is as yet simply no way of knowing. But just note the differences. The Republican speaker this time is going to be the cautious and experienced John Boehner, not the fiery and impetuous Newt. That could make compromise easier, but it will also be harder for the Obama White House to out-manouevre the other side. Second, the Republicans in 1994 had a worked-out strategy, the Contract with America, from which Mr Clinton could cherry-pick; this time they have only the broad slogan of spending cuts. Third, in 1994 the Clintons had watched their health reform go down in flames; this time the president has enacted his big reform already and will certainly do his utmost to defend it from repeal.

Last is the question of presidential beliefs and temper. As the proud author of health reform, what Joe Biden memorably called that “big fucking deal”, it is going to be very much harder for Mr Obama to rebrand himself as a plausible centrist, even if he would like to. And moving to the centre has dangers: it could further alienate his disappointed base and perhaps prompt a presidential challenge from the Democrats’ left.

One thing Bill did after 1994 was to resume horseback riding to “show that I wasn’t a cultural alien rural Americans couldn’t support”. Mr Obama already plays a lot of golf. Maybe he needs to take up hunting.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/11/triangulation_revisited?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/obamaclinton