For me I can't tell if he's a Jedi Master, playing chess on a three-leveled board way ahead of us, or this is kicking his ass.
--Jon Stewart to Bill O'Reilly
I don't know how pertinent the skills of a Jedi Master are to politics, but in this quote Jon manages to miss something a lot of people have missed in the last year: Barack Obama isn't a chess player. He is a poker player, and this week we saw the big scene where everybody lays down their cards: The showdown.
Chess is a game of perfect information. Chess masters don't tend to pay much attention to each others' mannerisms; the game is self-contained and complete. The only mystery it offers is the skill of your opponent, and the ability to outmaneuver him in what is basically a mechanical system.
But Poker is a game of luck and bluffing. You don't know what cards your opponent has and you can hide yours from him. His manner becomes important -- does he have a tell that indicates he has a poor hand when he's trying to bluff you, or a good hand when he's trying to get you to put money in a pot he expects to win? You don't get to pick your cards. You have to play the hand you're dealt, and that means you may start off with a very real disadvantage in any particular hand through no fault of your own. In real games of poker, only very foolish players even enter most of the hands.
In chess you can always play the same way, because if your anticipation and methods are superior you will generally prevail. In poker though you have to keep changing; if someone figures out you're a nit (a tight and passive player who avoids confrontation) that can be used against you to steal your blinds and go against you aggressively when you do enter a hand. But if you're pegged as a lagtard (an aggressive player who often goes in on bad hands) it can be used against you too, because people will challenge you when your hand is poor and take your money. Good players vary their level of aggression and even deliberately use random cues, such as whether the minutes on their digital watch are odd or even, to vary their decision making process. Or they will play a certain way for a period of time, maybe even deliberately telegraphing a certain style, then suddenly change styles when people have gotten too comfortable with what they think is your personality.
I noticed that Barack's political style was very poker-like even during the campaign, when he outmaneuvered better-funded organizations with supposedly better starting positions in both the primary and the general. I recall reading that Barack is actually a poker player, who is considered quite good by the friends he plays against. And then he started his Presidency with what everyone knew were really terrible cards -- a battered economy, a financial meltdown, a fiercely united opposition. And his stack of chips, a very thin majority in Congress with many unreliable members, was barely adequate for the game he found himself in. It was disappointing but not too surprising that he chose to play a very tight game. It was maddening that he kept playing tight when a lot of us thought he could go for more. But there was, we now see, a clear method to his play.
The strategy Barack has been following was dubbed "Rope-a-Dope," after Muhammad Ali's boxing style, by poker writer Dan Harrington: You play very tightly and defensively, like a nit, until your opponent becomes overconfident (in boxing he'd become tired, in poker he starts playing progressively poorer hands against you). Then suddenly, usually at an arbitrary point such as change of hour or dealer, you switch strategies. (You use the arbitrary trigger so there will be no pattern or tell to warn people when you might make such a shift.) Now instead of giving up small amounts in blinds and just not making money, you've got someone confident enough to go all-in against you when their own cards might not be so good. When you start betting against them it's too late; they're in the hand, and the longer they stay in the more they lose. In No-Limit Hold'Em, the game popularized by ESPN's televising of the World Series of Poker, you can often take all of of your opponent's chips in one hand if you play this right.
It struck me as a classic poker strike point when Barack's tenor suddenly changed at the first anniversary of his inauguration. The Republicans, of course, like many of us, had him pegged as a nit. But he wasn't playing poker against us (though we could influence the cards he got a bit, and some of us tried to). He had his eye on the real goal, setting up a situation where he could get his political foes to do something extremely stupid. It became obvious about a month ago that Health Care Reform was the hand Barack was going all-in on. It could have been something else, but that's the issue where he had the cards. The cards he had weren't super good; he'd bargained much away in his period of nittiness, and his stack had dwindled some since inauguration. But they were much better than his opponent realized, and by the time it began to occur to the Republicans that they were in trouble it was too late; they were committed. Having called him Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the Antichrist all in the space of a week, they made it impossible for themselves to exit the hand in any graceful way. So they bet it up to the end.
And when all the chips were in the pot, nobody had conceded and everyone showed their cards: The showdown, in this case performed in the form of a House vote. Obama's pocket nines didn't look like a very good hand, and like any sensible poker player he probably realized losing was a possiblity, one that would have put him out of the game. But the Republicans had gone all in on what poker players like to call a garbage hand. After letting them bluff him off of relatively small and inconsequential pots all year, he suddenly called and raised them when the stakes really mattered and they had overconfidently gone up against him with nothing.
And in case there was any doubt that Obama has changed his style, he promptly turned around and did as some of us have been begging for a year, and recess-appointed fifteen nominees the GOP had been blocking, conspicuously not recess appointing the GOP nominees he had offered in that nitty "spirit of bipartisanship." It's clear that a lot of Republicans still haven't figured out what was done to them and are sputtering that they need to go all-in again. There's just one problem -- Barack just took all their chips. Right now they are busily expelling the few people who are trying to explain this from their party.
I know it's been maddening to watch for a year as Barack let opportunities slide, neglected causes dear to our hearts, and even let HCR become only a shadow of what we really wanted. But I've always suspected he had his eye on the long game, and he knew those were hands he couldn't enter with the cards he had. He now has an advantage he hasn't enjoyed so far, a thoroughly discredited opponent and a party that has whiffed the scent of success. It's early days but he doesn't have to play like a nit any more, and the early signs are that Barack knows that style of play has served its purpose but outlived its usefulness.
The fifteen recess appointments are a good sign. Barack now has the chips he needs to enter hands he could be chased out of before, and I'll be watching keenly to see how he plays now.