Comments inspired by reading Nate Silver on Obama's "Price is Right" negotiating strategy.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/01/obamas-price-is-right-negotiating.html#comments if you haven't seen it.
I look at some of Obama's appointments, and my heart falls. DLC. Goddam Neocon rats crawling back onto the ship of state. Aw, crap. Four more years of the same. But wait a minute. Gates was piped aboard, yes--but along with him came a whole phalanx of progressive lieutenants.
"Looking forward," yes. But why is Rove so frantic about Eric Holder? Ah, yes, any prosecutions will come out of the AG's office. And John Kerry seems awfully tight with the Obama crowd. He's been waiting more than 20 years since Iran Contra.
And then I think of all those times in the election season when Obama would make a bonehead move that would, in retrospect, turn out to be the best possible thing to have done. The way he handled Ayers, Wright, the debates.
Hey, folks, a new game has come to town. I'm calling it
guess the finesse. For the past 8 years, the Bushco game was merely a series of destructive, self-serving and vicious actions.
Now with the advent of Obama, the whole level of the political game has risen from blunder and bludgeon to master-level chess, and no move is as simple as it looks. I believe he is laying groundwork for a very active and earth-shaking first 100 days. I think that for the next month or so, I'm only gonna comment on Obama's actions when I can see what the fruits of those actions are. The guy has mostly outsmarted me and everyone else so far, and often his initial moves have no direct or obvious relationship to his intended outcome--like a gambit in chess. I guess I want to see him in operation as President for a while before I continue to indulge my habit of drawing conclusions about the game he's playing on the basis of watching his first few moves.
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