Is Howard Dean starting to fly off the rails? There have already been several notable times during the campaign when his mouth has gotten him into trouble, but his recent flirtation with metrosexuality—when he came out of the closet as one and then went rushing right back in—was downright bizarre by any standard. Then there was his curious statement that he wants to “be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”

While Dean’s fellow Democrats are condemning him for his appeal to Confederate flag-flyers, Republicans are quietly stewing over the fact that Dean’s party label immunizes him from any lasting damage for comments that—had they come out of a Republican’s mouth—would have resulted in a media firestorm instead of a mere intra-party squabble.

But if Dean’s opponents in both parties treat the statement as just another verbal faux pas to be criticized, they’ll be ignoring another possibility: that this is part of a calculated strategy. This may be Howard Dean’s try for a Sister Souljah moment.

When Bill Clinton unseated President Bush in 1992, he ended a streak of Republican dominance in southern states that started in 1980. In explaining Clinton’s success in the south, campaign strategist James Carville said famously, “We didn’t break the Republican lock on the south. We just picked it.”

Is Howard Dean’s reference to the Confederate flag a sign that he’s trying to pick that lock, too?

In 1992, Bill Clinton campaigned with an acute awareness of what voters disliked about past Democratic presidential candidates. Warranted or not, a significant number of voters—particularly those in the south—held several negative perceptions of Democratic politicians that thwarted their presidential aspirations:

• They focus on group rights as opposed to individual rights, and they show a willingness to pander for minority votes.
• They tend to excuse criminal behavior and instead search for “root causes” that allow the blame to be shifted elsewhere, such as society as a whole.
• They support high taxes and heavy spending on a large welfare state.

By systematically trying to demonstrate to voters that none of these perceptions applied to him, candidate Clinton was able to neutralize many of the weaknesses that had doomed previous Democratic contenders. Clinton was able to convince voters that he really was a new kind of Democrat. As a result, the anti-liberal campaign that Bush ran so successfully against Michael Dukakis in 1998 was ineffective against Clinton in 1992; the charges simply wouldn’t stick.

Clinton’s favorite political play was triangulation: portray your opponent at one extreme and an apparent ally at the other. Then, stand in the middle so you don’t seem so extreme, and collect bonus points for your willingness to criticize an ally that everyone assumes you will support unquestioningly.

Triangulation is a form of positioning, where a politician stakes out unique territory in a voter’s mind using points of reference already known to the voter.

When Bill Clinton was first running for president, he was a political unknown. To succeed, it was crucial that voters associate him with a distinct message or idea. In other words, he needed to position himself, and he chose to run as “a new kind of Democrat.”

Perhaps Clinton’s first—and most symbolically significant—attempt to position himself as a new Democrat occurred in a speech to the Rainbow Coalition. Clinton created a major stir by criticizing rapper Sister Souljah, who suggested that black criminals leave other blacks alone and instead victimize white people. Saying her words were “filled with hate,” Clinton acknowledged publicly what few other Democrats would: white people don’t have a monopoly on racist views.

It was a remarkable moment: up until then, modern Democratic presidential candidates bent over backwards to avoid saying anything negative about anyone black, regardless of how much the criticism was deserved. But not only did Clinton do it, he did it at a meeting of a group run by Jesse Jackson!

With that one act, Clinton earned credibility with a segment of voters who believed Democrats were too far to the left on matters of race. Undoubtedly, this helped the Clinton campaign pick the Republican lock on the south.

Is Howard Dean stealing a page from Clinton’s playbook? If so, Dean’s maneuver is much more bold...and risky. Whereas Clinton merely criticized a black person for making incendiary comments, Dean is saying he wants to be the candidate that Confederate flag-flyers back in 2004.

In the past, when Dean’s off-the-cuff remarks got him in trouble, he usually backed away before the controversy generated too much heat. But that isn’t happening this time. Instead, Dean is standing firm, saying that while he thinks the Confederate flag is “a racist symbol,” he also thinks “the Democratic Party has to be a big tent.”

In other words, Dean’s message is: you’re a racist if you fly the Confederate flag, but I want your vote anyway.

Slick Willie he isn’t; triangulation does not entail insulting a guy while asking for his vote. But the fact that Dean is still sticking with his earlier comments makes me suspect that this is part of a deliberate strategy, one intended to inoculate him against charges that he’s too liberal for America, charges likely to fly during a general election campaign.

But Dean won’t be running in the general election unless he gets nominated first. Clinton at least waited until he had enough delegates to guarantee nomination. Dean hasn’t even won a primary; none have yet been held. The danger for Dean is that Democratic primary voters—who are more liberal than voters as a whole—will be less forgiving of his invoking the Confederate flag to win votes.

If Dean’s southern strategy turns off enough primary voters, he may end up wishing he had a better sense of timing. On the other hand, if he continues the strategy and still wins nomination, this President Bush may have as hard a time portraying Dean as a liberal as his father did with Bill Clinton.