Good Strategist or Calculating

The whole point of strategy is to carefully gage your position with the clear awareness that everything you do affects it in some way or another. I have often said that Hillary is by far the best strategist in the Democratic Party, but I worry about the party because being a strategist apparently makes you a target:
She's a triangulator. A trimmer. A carefully calculating pol who says what people want to hear. A canny candidate who is allergic to specifics.
Are these bad things in a candidate or a president? I think what the author, Howard Kurtz, really wants to say is that she seems to be lacking a core philosophy, which is, of course, a very bad thing in using our rules,but the media's whole idea on strategy is so fuzzy that their analysis consistently misses the point. However, on the left where so many people seem absolutely fanatical about their philosophy, we have to remember that Sun Tzu defines an excess of zeal of a philosophy as dangerous as the lack of it.