...President Obama just crushed the table.
As Yogi Berra said, it's deja vu all over again; this isn't the first time I've likened the President's strategy to an all-in hand of poker. The difference between that, the passing of HCR, and this, the debt ceiling negotiation, is that HCR was about Obama getting something he wanted, and this is about the Republicans not getting something they wanted.
Poker has long been understood as a useful model for things like politics and war. One of the first things early computers were used for was to model strategies for simplified poker-like bluffing games, and the output of that research -- much of it by John von Neumann -- informed much of our political and military strategy in the Cold War. Remember MAD and the destabilizing influence of anti-missile systems? That all came from poker.
So what has our poker player in chief been up to the last few weeks? Well, the Republicans did something extremely stupid; they made it very plain what they were going to do. It was obvious going into the debt ceiling talks that the teabaggers wanted no deal at all, and that Boehner did not have them on a leash. So Obama has been steadily feeding them their own ideas, confidently expecting them to trash their own position. And they have fallen for it beautifully.
As for the outrage in some quarters about what Obama has put on the table -- well, look, on the table is itself a poker term, coming from the fact that in many games betting is limited to what is literally on the table when the first cards are dealt. Politics is a bit more complicated, and in poker terms pretty much everything is on the table; it is not Obama, but Republicans, who established this by coming to the debt ceiling talks with a list of hostages.
Obama only started putting stuff like SS and Medicare on the table when it was crystal clear that there would be no deal at all, not under any terms, no matter what was offered. What he has been doing since then is the equivalent of offering cake and ice cream to someone on a hunger strike. When it became clear that the teabaggers would not accept any revenue increases at all, under any conditions, Obama started trotting out the delicious treats. Not even with a pony? Not even with two ponies? As he finally said Friday, is there anything you guys will agree to? As if the answer wasn't already obvious.
Back in pokerland, the result of all this is that Obama tricked the Republicans into revealing their hand, which turned out to be two low cards against Obama's pocket kings. (In this case, literally pocket kings; the titans of commerce and industry are unthrilled with the Republican intransigence Obama's strategy has revealed.) Obama will now probably get what he really wanted all along, a clean debt ceiling increase with all the hostages alive.
As for the Republicans, they came into this thinking their position was unassailable, not because they had good cards but because they controlled what was on the table -- the hostages. They thought they could out-bet Obama regardless of his cards. But by offering to shoot the hostages himself, he forced them to actually play their hand, which turned out, as their tells had made pretty clear, to be crap. The Republicans now have neither good cards nor hostages, and their coalition is in flames.
This isn't the first time, but it is probably the most dramatic time that the President has prevailed via the important poker strategy of misrepresenting his position not just to his opponents, but to all the bystanders too. This is a strategy which is useless in a game of perfect information such as chess, but is crucial in a bluffing game where you can hide elements of your position. Obama came into his Presidency with a pretty weak hand; he knew the Republicans would block him at every turn on general principles, at first with the Senate filibuster and then with their newly minted House majority.
But the Republicans made the huge Poker mistake of making their strategy clear, and Obama has played against that intransigence brilliantly. Once your style of play is known, it doesn't matter whether you're consistently tight or loose; if you're consistent that can be exploited. And the Republicans have been nothing if not consistent.
Meanwhile, Obama seems to be all over the map because in a Poker game that's what you do. You throw a few hands away so that when the big one comes, the other players won't see it coming. If you only bet big when you have aces, everyone else knows to fold when you bet and your aces aren't worth anything. Obama has left everyone wondering just what kind of player he is, leaving his opponents confused and uncertain just how to react.
In poker, that kind of play is called "good." The way you know it's good play is by seeing who has all the cheques at the end of the day. Over and over, people have expected Obama to be walking away from the table, busted and broken. Yet he's still there, and it's the other players who are left wondering how he's still in the game at all.