Politics and Chess Made Clearer

A renewed interest in improving my mediocre chess game brought me to an epiphany of sorts and leads me to (temporarily) abandon my usual format of comment on this or that article. Friend Bill Karneges recently put online perhaps the finest instructional book on chess ever written. More on that later. What, epiphanized me (in that moment of sudden understanding) is that modern American politics is but a chess game, where we are frustratingly unable to see the board.

Obama moves a knight (delivering health care) and we fault him for its shortcomings, failing to see the endgame because it is withheld from our view. He advances a pawn (bailing out the deceivers) and we scoff, feeling an abandonment of principle.

Yet perhaps, just perhaps, Obama and Rahm Emanuel are Grand Masters and, were we to see the board with all its challenges, various threats and opportunities, a different opinion might form in our minds. I (and our nation alike) have been myopically focused on opening moves (a presid…