Posted on 06/28/2004 3:03:54 AM PDT by beyond the sea
"One of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W. Bush’s political career. He is not one to loudly proclaim his strengths at the beginning of a campaign. Instead, he bides his time, does not respond forcefully, a least at first, to critiques from his enemies, no matter how loud and annoying they get. If anything, this apparent passivity only goads them into making their case more emphatically."
Later in the campaign and in the debates, lets hope that is when George plays his cards, and lets the public know what the lamestream media selfishly ignores.
And in this morning's handover of power to the Iraqis.
BTTT
Great article. When people say "chess, not checkers," I've often thought "No, it's poker. You don't know when he is strong or when he is bluffing." The final point in the article is interesting. Thanks for posting this.
Good article. My favorite tactic at poker was to keep the weakest player in as long as possible and use him as a lever into the stronger players pockets.
bttt
Only time will tell, whether Saddam ever had any WMDs. Their non-existence has not been proven. Only time will tell whether or not Osama bin Laden (or his corpse) will be taken into custody by American Troops. Only time will tell whether or not Iraq will continue to make progress toward a transition toward a peaceful democratic government. George W. Bush knows much more information about these topics than his domestic political opponents do. At the moment, they are betting a lot of their chips on one side of these questions.We will see by November who has the winning hand.
The comparatively small amount of attention paid by the political press to the President’s Harvard MBA partially reflects a generalized ignorance of, and hostility toward, the degree itself. More importantly, acknowledging that he learned any valuable intellectual perspectives would contradict the storyline that young W was a party animal, who coasted through his elite education, scarcely cracking a book. In other words, as the left never tires of claiming, he is too “stupid” to have picked up any tricks across the Charles River from Harvard Square.Claiming your own candidate with mediocre undergraduate grades and no graduate degree is incredibly brilliant, and that the opposing candidate with a Harvard MBA is "dumb" is a form of cheap talk, of taunting the opposition into a flame war. If you succeed you will win if and only if you have "objective journalism" on your side.
Which is why George Bush plays tar baby in that case.
. . . [Bush's top priority now is] the War on Terror. There is no evidence that this was on his initial short list of priorities. But after 9/11, he made himself very clear, very quickly, that his priorities had drastically changed.I dunno if #2 was originally #1 on Bush's "to do" list, but if you recall the '00 Republican National Convention the entertainment looked like BET network. There is a certain cognitive dissonance in the slavish devotion of the black electorate to the party of slavery, Jim Crow, and "the soft biggotry of low expectations." As recently as 1960 the Republican nominee (Nixon) actually expected to get good support from black voters (indeed, as Eisenhower's veep Nixon had some reason to hope for that support; Eisenhower had integrated Washington DC and sent the troops to Little Rock). Had he been determined merely to win, the "Southern Strategy" of 1968 was open to Nixon in 1960 but would have been controversial in the Republican Party.. . . his second broad goal is to build a long-lasting pattern of Republican political dominance of government, by . . . adding to the existing GOP stalwart groups . . . a substantial number of lower income, but upward-mobility-aspiring members of every group, including ethnic minorities, especially Hispanics, but also as many blacks as possible.
Blacks have voted 90% Democrat since then, and that has built up a tradition which the Democrats nurture with demogogery and will be hard to undo. But Bush knows that if he can take even 20% of the black vote (and hold his own base), that would make the Republican Party the majority party.
Ouch! Anyone entering the classroom needs a "crap detector", eh?
I hear you. BTW, your thoughts and writing on the media, the press, news, and journalism are one of the best things about this site. Keep up the good work, and include me on your "media, press, journalism" ping list if you have one.... please.
The text was from a guy who apparently transcribed it from Rush's show and put it on FR months ago, so that may be where the errors originated. I am sorry for the errors here. They subtract from the important ideas, so I apologize.
These techniques are straight out of Sun Tzu's ...The Art of War.
Great tactic. I guess we should let Gore, Moore, Begala, Carville, Dean, and the rest keep spewing up until the election then, eh? ;)
George W. Bush is a natural delegator, an executive who seeks the best possible people to work for him, instills loyalty (by practicing it himself), and then gives them plenty of room to operate. His “sins” as an executive have been, and are likely to remain those of a loose leash, allowing ineffective subordinates too much time and too much room. This is why it has taken him so long to remove certain cabinet officials."Personnel is policy."
Bush would IMHO have done better to have rehabilitated Jack Kemp (after he stunk up the joint in his debate with Al Gore) by naming him as Secretary of the Treasury straight out of the box. He would not then have had any issue of lack of Treasury support for tax cuts. And - a Bush priority - Kemp isn't going to hurt you with black voters, either.
But the main point is that Kemp is an economic visionary who deserves huge credit for shifting the Republican party from Bob "tax collector for the welfare state" Dole and Jerry "Whip Inflation Now" Ford to the historical growth since 1982. And who advocated the government's selling gold to Reagan, at the perfect time to have softened the Recession of 1981 due to Volker's throttling the money supply to stop inflation as was necessary.
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