Hillary's triangulation on baseball

The summer is over, and we're past Labor Day an into the official campaign, so there has to be better things to write about than Mark Shields' column bashing Hillary's sports team preferences. He describes the moment at the end of the last debate:

But in the last minutes of Wednesday night's MSNBC debate at Dartmouth College, Hillary Clinton committed a major misstep. Moderator Tim Russert asked her whom she would root for in a 2007 World Series between the hometown team of her childhood, the Chicago Cubs, or the New York Yankees, who play in her adopted state. Clinton bobbed and weaved until Russert put it directly to her: "But who would you be for?" Then, in a totally triangulating and unsatisfying formulation, she tried to split the difference: "I guess I would have to alternate."

I heard this exchange on the radio the morning after, and thought it was very clever and funny, Hillary outwitting her press interrogators yet again. But Shields blathers on and on about how a true fan can't do that. Well, Hillary's not a true fan. A lot of people aren't true sports fans. They root for winners, they barely pay attention to pro sports most of the time, and they split their allegiances. I think it's a relatively common phenomenon for people who are into sports to have difficulty deciding who to root for, when there's two teams they like. Hillary expressed that experience, and she did it in a way that was self-deprecating, as everyone knows she triangulates.

Shields was facing a deadline here and was out of ideas.