Stalemate is the narrative that currently defines the Democratic race. In high-level chess, either a draw or a stalemate is considered a quasi-victory for black because of the inherent tempo disadvantage of making the second move. White has an advantage, just as in tennis the player who has the serve does. Only the clearly superior player wins playing black. That’s Obama’s position right now; he’s playing his match to what looks like it will end in a draw, and while it’s better than a lot of people expected, it’s not clear yet whether his endgame will be good enough to overcome his strategic disadvantage to win.
That’s probably why the national media seems not to be paying as much attention to our caucus later today in Washington State and the elections in Louisiana and Nebraska. Stalemate or a draw is not a very media-satisfying narrative. Even if Obama wins, he’s supposed to, just as Clinton is supposed to win Texas and Ohio. As good chess players see the game several moves forward, so now we all see that whatever gains Obama makes in the short run will likely be given back in the long run. He may take a knight, a bishop, and a couple of pawns now only to lose a rook and a bishop later.
So the country today does not look to Washington and the other contests today in the expectant way it did as the Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina contests approached. The world looked to those little states to see if either player would get an advantage from his or her opening strategy, and neither did. We’re in the midgame now, and it’s a slog to the end, tediously trading pieces, only to end in likely draw or stalemate. The story shifts away from the elections in the states to speculation about whether stalemate can be avoided in the endgame or postgame. Will new tiebreaker matches in Michigan or Florida be scheduled? Will the superdelegates decide it instead of the players? Will Howard Dean succeed in asking one of the candidates to concede for the good of the party?
So even if Obama gets some big double-digit wins today, we’ve been there in Iowa, and done that in South Carolina. He wasn’t able to build a winning momentum from those wins then, and it’s not likely he’ll be able to develop any significant momentum from wins today. Maybe it will look different tomorrow, but that’s what it looks like going into today.
It’s amazing, when you think about it, how evenly split we Americans are about so many things in the political sphere. Most people have heard about the primary vote total from the Syracuse, NY, district–1202 votes split exactly 601 to 601 between Obama and Clinton. It symbolizes the kind of paralysis we’re feeling as a nation right now. How is it possible in a society as complex as ours that our Republican/Democratic presidential elections in the last two cycles have been so evenly split, and now in this cycle so evenly split between Obama and Clinton? If the nation anticipates that the Democratic Republican split won’t be as even this time, it has figured out a way to transfer it to the Democratic race, which is the more likely to give us our next president.
Clinton is a creature of stalemate politics, and she would be the better choice if you believed that stalemate will be the dominant theme going into the future. She knows how to survive in that kind of political environment. But a vote for Clinton is a vote for continued stalemate, and that’s not the worst possibility. It’s better to stand still than to move backwards. I would have been happy with stalemate the last eight years if it meant neutralizing Cheney/Bush.
But during that time, despite how evenly matched the competitors, the Republicans have been playing white, and they have found a way to use their slight advantage eke out victories in almost every match they’ve played with the Democrats. And with each Republican victory, we have taken a step backward. A vote for Clinton is a vote that she playing white as president will have the advantage the Republicans had, and maybe she like they will be able to eke out some victories. But the Republicans have proven they are the superior tacticians, and it’s more likely they playing black will play Clinton to a stalemate. The Clintons were playing white in the early nineties, and if they didn’t lose the game outright, the best you can say is that they played a rope-a-dope defensive game that ended in a draw.
So the way I look at it, in this election cycle a vote for a Republican would be a vote to keep regressing, a vote for Clinton to stagnate in stalemate, and a vote for Obama to start once again to move forward. He has a different kind of strategy that has a very good chance of flummoxing the movement conservatives who won’t know how to deal with it, at least in the short run. They know Clinton’s game and how to play her to a draw, but Obama is likely to get at least a couple of moves’ tempo advantage. I’d like to see what he does with it.
We Americans have made some god-awful bad choices in the past decade. I hope at least on the Democratic side, we’ve wised up a little. The country in the last eight years has seen democracy at its worst. The ancients thought that democracy was the second worst form of government because it was so vulnerable to morphing into tyranny. They saw time and again how the crowd was so easily manipulated by the demagoguery of wannabe tyrants who used fear and false promises to obtain from the crowd the support they need to achieve their narrow, self-interested ends.
That kind of manipulation is always a part of the political package in America and in other modern democracies, but clearly in the last eight years our democracy has suffered that kind of manipulation more egregiously than at any other time in living memory. So it’s an open question for me whether we have learned our lesson and are ready to move on. Choosing Clinton would not be the worst thing, but neither would it be moving on. And my fear is that it leaves us more vulnerable to a renewed attack by the forces of demagoguery in 2010 and 2012. We have an opportunity with Obama to move past all of that–or at least get a head start on it. He offers the opportunity for something better, not the certainty of obtaining it, but it would be a shame to miss it.
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