Chess is one of those games in which you are required to move when it’s your turn; you can’t pass. Mostly this is a good thing; still, there are situations where you’d be fine if you didn’t have to move, but you do.

This condition is known as zugzwang, a German word meaning the compulsion to move. There’s even an Immortal Zugzwang game, Sämish-Nimzovich, Copenhagen 1923, complementing Anderssen’s Immortal Game against Kieseritzky, London 1851 (which had nothing to do with positional play and was all about attack; that was Anderssen).

It appears to me that Senator Clinton is nearing a position of zugzwang in her attempt to gain the Democratic party nomination for President.

You’ve probably heard about Senator Obama’s response to a question about his perceived lack of experience: that having lived in Indonesia when he was young and having family in Kenya gives him a more complete idea of what the rest of the world is like than one might expect to gain from congressional or executive-branch junkets.

“You get picked up at the airport by this big convoy of security details,” Obama said in a campaign stop in Iowa, which holds its crucial leadoff caucuses nominating contests on January 3.

“They drive you over to the ambassador’s house. You get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance,” he told an audience of about 300 people.

[…]

“If you don’t understand these cultures then it’s very hard for you to make good foreign policy decisions. Foreign policy is all about judgment,” said Obama.

A swipe at the frontrunner, no doubt, but an oblique one that questions her judgement rather than her integrity. So did Clinton respond with a measured statement about her strengths? Well, she thinks she did.

I believe I have the right kind of experience to be the next President. With a war and a tough economy, we need a President ready on Day One to bring our troops home from Iraq and to handle all of our other tough challenges.

Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next President will face. I think we need a President with more experience than that.

The problem is that as soon as she brings up the subject of her experience, she focuses attention on the fact that nearly all of it was very poorly executed. She voted for the war in Iraq, and never apologized, though she has worked hard to muddy the waters. She voted for Kyl-Lieberman, the attempt by the Most Hypocritical Person in the Senate to authorize a war against Iran, though she denies that was the intent. (I note in passing the utter hypocrisy of Obama criticizing her for that vote, since he didn’t even bother to show up for it.)

This left an opening for a spokesman from the Edwards campaign to offer to define the relevent term.

mudslinging … (also mud-slinging) noun informal

the use of insults and accusations, esp. unjust ones, with the aim of damaging the reputation of an opponent. As in: Hillary Clinton said about Barack Obama, “Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face.”

“Now we know what Senator Clinton meant when she talked about ‘throwing mud’ in the last debate. Like so many other things, when it comes to mud, Hillary Clinton says one thing and throws another”.

The problem for Clinton is that her policies are Republican and pro-war machine. So she can’t talk about what she actually plans to do, or who supports her; she has to attempt to finesse those issues for an entire year, all of which would, if she were nominated, be spent in the brightest spotlight on the planet, under attack from Republicans following the Rove playbook. Notice how she sidesteps the issue of the war, saying we need someone who’s ready to bring the troops home, though she has listed a dozen reasons why that might not be possible. This is not even triangulation; it’s dissumulation.

Her entire platform appears to be the inevitability of her nomination. No one need bother to oppose her, despite the general disagreement of the party with her policies, or the size of her negatives (more people say they’d never vote for her than for any other candidate in the race), because she’s got more money than anyone else. Sure, three-quarters of it comes from about 5,000 people; but her base makes up in wealth for what it lacks in breadth.

So now that she’s dropped from a small lead in Iowa to a small deficit, she’s imploding. If she doesn’t finish first in Iowa there’ll be a hell of a lot spinning going on, and only the true believers will buy it.

She can’t talk about her policies. Bringing up her experience is a net negative. She can get Bill to play the gender card for her, complaining that the boys are beating up on her, but that makes her look weak.

The thing is, as a candidate, she is so weak that she has no strengths to retreat to. Anything she does points to one or more weakness; but she can’t maintain her aura of inevitability without doing anything.

Zugzwang.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at November 21, 2007 03:13 AM

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