Before I got back into chess three years ago, I'd devoted several years of my life to learning and achieving some degree of mastery of the game of go. If you're not familiar with go, it's an ancient board game that originated in Asia, in which two players place pieces in an effort to control the greater amount of territory on the board. A finished game might look like this:
I find certain go concepts extremely useful in thinking about electoral politics. I'm going to introduce a few of them here, then discuss what they mean for progressives and for Democratic candidates and elected officials. But far and away the most important of these -- the one you should remember even if you forget all the rest -- is the concept of sente -- the "leading hand."
The terms sente and gote ("following hand") concern the concept of initiative. Roughly speaking, a player in sente has the initiative, and a player in gote doesn't. More precisely:
A sente move (or sequence of moves) is one that forces your opponent to respond, then leaves you with the freedom to play anywhere you like on your next turn; a gote move is one that you are forced to make by your opponent, or one that requires no response, after which he gets to play anywhere he likes.
A key to effective play is keeping sente as long you can and winning it back whenever possible.
George Lakoff, if he's reading this, has already, instantly, grasped the significance of sente and gote in terms of political messaging: Always, always, always, you should be dictating the terms of the debate, not letting your opponent dictate them to you. Funnily enough, it doesn't matter if your opponent gets the last word. In fact, you don't want to get the last word in any exchange. You want your opponent to get the last word, but you want it to be one that you don't have to answer.
Think about how Karl Rove has exploited this principle, using the technique I call "schoolyard judo": preemptively accusing one's opponent of what one is guilty of oneself. If a Republican who supports job-killing trade policies is out front in a campaign accusing his Democratic opponent of killing jobs, what can the Democrat say?
"No, you're the one destroying jobs in America, not me!"?
Every middle schooler knows that this is unutterably lame. The Democrat has no comeback; the truth is no defense. The fact is, the Republican got his message out there first, in a way that forced the Democrat to reply -- causing himself harm in the process, or at least causing him to stumble -- and, most important, leaving the Republican free to make the next move of his choice.
What if the Democrat simply ignores the Republican? Well, now, that depends on whether he can afford to. If he can afford to ignore a message, he should ignore it; he should prefer some other maneuver that allows him to force a response from the Republican. In go, this is called "making your biggest play," i.e., the one that affects the disposition of the largest amount of territory.
Back to the basics of the game. One interesting feature of go is that it has a handicapping mechanism so that two players of differing strengths can play a balanced game. A player's strength is measured in kyu (amateur ranks) or dan (master ranks). As a player increases in strength, kyu numbers count down, but dan numbers count up, so a 3-kyu player is stronger than a 6-kyu, but a 6-dan is stronger than a 3-dan. For every difference in rank, the weaker player (who always takes black and plays first) is given a handicap stone in a strategic position on the board. Therefore, the 3-kyu is said to be "three stones stronger" than the 6-kyu. A game between them would start out looking like this:
Note that black begins with influence over three corners of the board.
The corners are crucial in go, because they can be surrounded most efficiently -- that is, they get you the most territory with the fewest stone placements. The sides are the second highest priority. The center is the lowest -- surrounding territory there takes the most work and offers the least reward.
Think of the corners as your base: the part of the electorate that's easiest to win over, but that's crucial to victory, without which your electoral chances fall apart. The sides of the board represent leaners: not difficult to pick up, but hard to pick up without alienating someone else. (The trick is to alienate people whose votes you don't need.) Think of the center as those voters who are most difficult to persuade, least likely to turn out to vote, or otherwise unlikely to be worth the amount of money and effort expended on them directly.
For example, the Deep South is a corner for the Republican Party. In fact, it's a corner in which the Republicans already have a handicap stone -- they enter every election with a certain amount of control there. Similarly, New England is a corner for the Democratic Party. You can think of others easily enough, and I won't bother to enumerate them.
In any given game of go, eventually the whole board will be controlled (see picture at top), so every game is a race to surround territory faster than your opponent. At all times, you have to strike a balance between speed and security: an impregnable wall won't surround much territory, while a huge swath of territory will have gaps where your opponent can reduce (push against your border, making a dent) or invade (play in the heart of your territory with the hope of stealing some or all of it). These maneuvers are like forcing a bloc of voters to commit to one position or the other, one candidate or the other. You're accepting that you're going to force some voters to solidify themselves behind your opponents' position, but you're hoping to minimize that number, while maximizing the number who solidify behind yours. When you reduce, you're pushing uncommitted leaners to commit, whereas when you invade, you're trying to tear already committed voters away from the opponent's position and win them over to yours. Invading is riskier but potentially much more profitable. There's also the option to extend into territory that neither player has yet claimed -- to lay first claim to the truly undecided. Particularly in the opening phase of the game, extensions are often the biggest plays. And a player often extends past the point where he actually expects to claim territory, just to make his opponent expend energy cutting off the stone he reached farthest with (called a "sacrifice stone").
How you play depends in large part on whether you're ahead or behind. The player who controls more territory is better off playing a steady game, securing what he's got and expanding at a measured pace. The player who controls less territory has to play more aggressively to close the gap -- take bigger leaps, invade here and there, and above all, stay in sente.
Thus, to politick like a go player, you have to know the territory; you have to know whether you or your opponent controls more of it; you have to know which unclaimed territory is most valuable; you have to be willing to play boldly and take chances when you're behind, and to play it safe and not overreach when you're ahead; and you have to strive, at all times, to choose your battlegrounds rather than give your opponent the chance to choose them for you.
As an illustration, consider a presidential race. Let's postulate that the following states are safely Democratic: ME, VT, MA, RI, CT, NY, MD, IL, MN, WA, OR, CA, HI, DC (total electoral votes in 2012: 179). Let's also postulate that the following states are safely Republican: SC, GA, AL, MS, KY, TN, ND, SD, NE, KS, OK, TX, MT, ID, WY, UT, AZ, AK (total electoral votes: 173). This is a fairly even game, and a fortunate circumstance for Democrats -- by contrast, in 2004, the Republicans began the campaign with three-fifths of all the electoral votes they needed to win locked up in safe states, while the Democrats had only one-fourth of what they needed, a situation equivalent to a handicap game in which the Republicans always got the extra stones, regardless of the relative strengths of the players!
When you're coming from behind, as Democrats often have been in the past, you have to choose a candidate who not only is skillful but will follow the correct strategy. When the Democratic candidate starts from behind, he or she can't afford to play cautiously; to do that is to invite defeat. To close the gap, the Democrat has to play an attacking game. He or she has to play aggressively, to reduce and invade, to take risks, to swipe votes from the Republican while building up an unassailable store of his or her own, and above all, to maintain sente. John Kerry, restrained when he needed to be aggressive, was sadly unequal to the task; Barack Obama, on the other hand, was easily "three stones stronger" than John McCain, and he also knew he had to campaign boldly. Obama outplayed McCain before all our eyes. (Sadly, the Republicans turned around and pulled off a masterful invasion during the health care reform debacle, much to our collective detriment.)
Regardless of whether one is ahead or behind, it's also necessary to take advantage of the opponent's errors. This is the one and only respect in which the Democratic Party's perennial underdog status is in any way an advantage. The only reason it's an advantage is that the Republicans always campaign as if they were behind. Today's Republicans are bred-to-the-bone attack dogs. A quiet game is anathema to them. Even when they're ahead, they will attack -- and they will overplay. To win, the Democrat must not only maintain his own offensive but also skillfully turn the Republican's overplays against him.
Go is a game that has spawned many proverbs. Here is a short selection of them, translated into political terms:
- "The enemy's key play is my own key play." That is, an exchange is often won by the person who plays first on a vital or contested point. This can mean that a hot-button issue will be "won" by the candidate who publicly cuts to the heart of it first. It can also mean that a state or a demographic bloc will be won by the first candidate to hit it with the right appeal. Many states are politically divided, which is to say, they're juicy territory for both the Democrat and the Republican, and the aggressive Democrat needs to hit them first. Imagine, if you will, the potential advantage in wresting Texas from the Republicans' "safe" column through a forceful appeal to that state's immigrant, minority and metropolitan voters -- alienating evangelicals, farmers and ranchers in the process, inevitably, but remember, we weren't going to get them anyway. In go, you can't afford to be greedy. You can't have it all. You'll get some, and you'll give some up. The trick is to make sure you're getting more than you give up. Winning by one point is still winning.
- "When your opponent has two weak groups, attack them both at once." That is, if you can build strength with which to attack the second group by attacking the first, you should do so deliberately. Go is full of sacrifice plays and "judo" -- you often play in one direction in order to gain strength in the other. If the opponent is weak in both a smaller contested state or demographic bloc and in a larger one, take him on in the smaller one in such a way that it bolsters your position in the larger one -- then seize the larger one. Again, you can afford to give up territory in one place as long as you're gaining more territory elsewhere.
- "Contact fighting is for defending, not attacking." "Contact fighting" means playing your stones immediately adjacent to your opponent's. Since it deprives your own stones of freedom as well as his, it's not an effective way to attack. I see contact fighting as perhaps being equivalent to negative campaigning -- it can hurt both sides, but sometimes you've got to do it to solidify yourself. You shouldn't apply it offensively, however, unless you know you can outmaneuver your opponent. When attacking, it's better to keep a bit of distance, outrunning and outflanking your opponent instead of getting in his face -- then, once he's surrounded, going for the squeeze.
- "The third line is for territory, the fourth for influence." This has to do with where players place stones during the opening; they refer to the lines parallel to the edge of the board. Playing along the third line secures territory in the corner and along the edge. Playing along the fourth line builds "thickness" that can be projected into the center. Note that the center of the go board doesn't necessarily correspond to the political "center," but rather the votes that are harder to win relative to their value. Thus, around your bases, you want to play for territory -- to ensure that you're locking in those blocs that are essential to your victory. On the other hand, around your opponent's bases, which you can't win, you want to play against that territory in order to gain influence elsewhere -- for instance, deliberately butting heads with white cultural conservatives in order to score points with otherwise hard-to-mobilize African American voters. In other words, motivate the undecided and disaffected by pushing against those who you know you'll never win over anyway.
- * "The poor player plays the opponent's game for him." I think we know what this one means all too well. It's the political tragedy that Democrats re-mount year after year. Aren't we ready for a new show?
To sum up, the ideal Democrat, the truly electable and politically effective Democrat, has four qualities:
- He's more skillful than the Republican, enough to make up for any electoral handicap.
- He correctly chooses an aggressive, risk-taking strategy when the field is tilted against him.
- He exploits the opponent's overplays.
- Most important, he never stops dictating the terms, the pace and the ground on which political battles are fought.
It's dangerous for Democrats to equate "electability" with centrism, inoffensiveness or any other safe and cautious quality. These traits do not fare well against an aggressive opponent who starts the game with a sizable lead. But it's also dangerous to talk only to one's base and ignore the wave upon wave of opposition messages being broadcast to persuadable independents. Like it or not, the campaign never ends. It's not just about electing Democrats. It's about getting the kind of health care or financial reform that we want, about protecting budget items and civil liberties, about defending the hard-won economic security and opportunity we still retain from the relentless attacks of a plutocratic elite. It's about recognizing that you don't pass until the game is over, and the game isn't over until both sides pass.
Thanks to greywolfe359 for inspiring me to revise and revamp my first-ever DKos diary.