The political use of the old term was first used by Clinton's chief political advisor
Dick Morris as a way to describe his strategy for getting Clinton reelected in the
1996 U.S. presidential election. The opposition
Republicans had scored a landslide to take control of Congress in the
1994 U.S. elections. Clinton needed to pass and take credit for legislation by winning over a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, abandoning the
progressive Democrats he had previously worked with. In Morris' words, triangulation meant "the president needed to take a position that not only blended the best of each party's views but also transcended them to constitute a
third force in the debate." It is also sometimes referred to as "
Clintonian triangulation". Morris advocated a set of policies that were different from the traditional policies of the
Democratic Party. These policies included
deregulation and
balanced budgets. One of the most widely cited capstones of Clinton's triangulation strategy was when, in his
1996 State of the Union Address, Clinton declared that the "era of
big government is over". Commentators sometimes speculated that Clinton's emphasis on entrepreneurship and the post-industrial sector was the co-option of
conservative ideas first presented by
Reagan Republicans in the 1980s. Brent Cebul argues that triangulation represented a traditional
liberal effort to structure the economy with the goals of creating new jobs and at the same time producing fresh tax revenues that can support progressive policy innovations. Cebul argues that this tradition goes back to the local and state policies inspired by the
New Deal, and the "
supply-side liberalism" of the 1970s. == Other use ==