People make fun of the theory that President Obama engages in 11-dimensional chess. It’s hard to adequately explain what the term means because it probably means different things to different people. However, it basically means that sometimes the president uses deception. He may pretend to support something that he actually opposes, or to oppose something that he actually supports. I believe the clearest example of this is his position on Plan B contraception. It’s over now. The administration no longer opposes the over-the-counter accessibility of Plan B contraception for any woman, no matter how young. But they went to court to restrict access for young girls, and even appealed when they initially lost.
The unique element of the case was that Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took the unusual step of contravening the Food & Drug Administration’s determination that the drug was safe for young girls to take. The president then backed his Health Secretary’s decision, despite it being quite unpopular with the Democratic base.
The controversy was magnified when the Department of Justice decided to appeal the case. Yet, the DOJ has decided to stand down now. They could have appealed two more times, but they have decided to comply with the District Court’s ruling.
The result is that the policy is correct but the administration has taken a lot of heat from its base. This helped assure that the controversy didn’t galvanize Obama’s opponents in an election year while never actually jeopardizing the right outcome.
This is how 11-dimensional chess works.
BUT BUT BUT OBAMA IS GONNA DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY!!!
oh wait.
side effect: we have a clear idea precisely who “Obama’s base” is.
That’s just politics.
I can think of at least two problems with your theory.
If your theory were correct, Obama would continue the appeal, because he expected to lose it.
re: your point 1. Because Republicans will run against Obama in the midterm elections. They do distrust the President but they cannot run on big, bad Obama wants your babies to have birth control.
re: your point 2. Yes, and that is not inconsistent with Booman’s point. But no, he doesn’t have to continue the appeal to prove Boo’s point as might lose is sufficient.
11th dimensional chess seems like old-fashioned organizing to me. Think Rules for Radicals.
Do you really not think his work is done here? Does he really have to appeal again?
Look at the comments here. He’s created the perception he wanted to create.
That is not called 11-dimensional chess. That is called bluffing, and it is the essence of poker.
The Achilles heel in that approach, necessary as the approach might be at this point in history, is that no one knows what the President actually stands for or is advocating. That creates the appearance of being without direction and just capitulating to whatever forces are out there. And it does not identify issues with which the base can rally around what the President is advocating because they cannot know when he is advocating and when he is bluffing.
He cannot Sister Souljah his base on every controversial issue because the GOP is not going to buy the line that he is one of them. And they can mobilize against dishonesty as well as the content of the issues themselves. The only reason that that is no longer effective is that the GOP is experiencing the same corporate-populist division that the Democrats are.
You keep using that word “base” wrong,
The people you’re talking about are a fringe of a segment of a wing of a faction.
They are not the Democratic base.
So you are arguing that he isn’t bluffing? Or are you trotting out your stereotype about who I think the base is?
If they aren’t the Democratic base and I am not the Democratic base, then I have wasted thirty years of voting and working on elections trying to keep the Democratic Party in power. Including in this last election.
There were eighty members of the Democratic base in North Carolina who got arrested at the state legislative building last night because the North Carolina Democratic Party and the national Democrats decided not to build on their victory in 2008. The North Carolina Democratic Party is in disarray because it got too close to corporate influence.
Who is the Democratic base in your mind?
I have no idea how you can get from what I wrote to “He’s not bluffing.”
And there is no stereotyping involved here. You are mischaracterizing the Democratic base.
If you spent the last thirty years working to win the Democrats the votes of high-information liberals with a huge internet presence, then yes, you’ve been wasting your time – but I don’t think you’ve been doing that.
The progressive base of the party is primarily people of color, whether you are talking voters or actual representatives. If you poll progressives, you will find very broad support for the president, even on things that white progressives go ballistic about. And progressives are just a part of a much broader coalition that includes people who are not doctrinaire at all. I saw some polling that well over 60% of Democrats support these NSA programs, for example. White progressives almost uniformly oppose them. That doesn’t make white progressives wrong, but it does highlight our small status. We are part of the base, but we are not representative of the base.
Once upon a time, such people proudly declared themselves to be a vanguard.
What’s wrong with being a vanguard? Why do white progressives now feel the need to insist that they’re not only right, but mainstream?
Oh, it’s “white progressives”, is it?
The folks getting arrested in Raleigh last night were not exclusively “white progressives”. Indeed it has taken the revitalization of the NC NAACP for the issues that “white progressives” of Occupy Wall Street were getting arrested for in 2011 to make it into a part of the mainstream.
And the role that progressives, white, black and Latino are playing right now is not a vanguard role. It’s a rearguard role trying to protect the progressive programs that Democrats built in this state 80 years ago. Trying to keep public schools from closing. Trying to protect property rights from mineral rights hucksters. But it seems not all Democrats are down with that conservative rearguard agenda.
Oh, it’s “white progressives”, is it?
Yep. The comment I was replying to, from BooMan, was about white progressives. Did you read it?
You are a white progressive.
Stop hiding behind other people. We’re talking about you.
You love to personalize your bullshit, don’t you?
…says the guy who keeps responding to every point about political dynamics with I WAS AT A RALLY WITH REAL PEOPLE! HOW DARE YOU?!?
I responded to you discussion about political dynamics with a discussion about the political dynamics as they appear here and grounded it with a real example.
I did not personalize it.
The folks getting arrested (I have some good friends who were arrested there) were not there in protest of Plan B.
If anything Moral Monday proves the point that Booman and Joe are making about the Democratic base.
And that particular point would be what?
The point is that the base was not taking to the streets over Plan B. The multi racial coalition in NC is not talking about Plan B.
It is an important issue to be sure but not one which has mobilized the base of the Democratic Party.
The context of my interchange with Joe was about political dynamics in general and not specific to Plan B. What has mobilized Moral Mondays is only now beginning to mobilize part (and it is still only a small part) of the Democratic Party in NC. And what it is in NC is the external control through ALEC of the North Carolina legislature and the rapidity with which the GOP seeks to make changes that will be hard to undo.
And the collaboration of some Democrats in that process. Last year the fracking bill passed by a Democratic vote–which was cutely passed off as an “Ooops I hit the wrong button but the meanie Republican Speaker wouldn’t let me change my vote.” Didn’t pass the smell test.
I agree with all of this. However, the point to which Joe of Lowell responded was that misdirection makes it very difficult for the diverse base to create the large popular movement that moves Congress.
If 60% of Democrats support NSA programs, that no different from the Daley Democrats and Scoopocrats who supported the Vietnam War. It did not change the fact that the Vietnam War was a disaster both for the US and the Democratic Party. Allowing NSA programs to stay in place will mean tyranny at some point; we just barely dodged it with the Bush administration (thanks to a lady in a vegetative state and a hurricane).
The fact is that no one group is representative of the base; so money rules the elected officials.
Part of my point is that white progressives have a tendency to speak for the progressive movement when they are actually in the minority opinion-wise among progressives. One example was the FDL effort to kill ObamaCare.
It really has nothing to do with the merits of any particular issue.
It’s just a fact that not-white progressives have a different point of view about the president and about progress in general. I don’t thin many blacks, for example, are operating on the assumption that progress is made wholesale and without compromising on principles.
Proving that a black man can create a winning coalition and preserve it is as important as any of the particulars because it makes everything else possible. But you have to understand what a progressive coalition actually looks like and what its limitations are within our system of governance.
Most of what Obama has done for progressives (aside from the health care subsidies) has been done without much fanfare (consumer protection, credit card reform) and often with ostensible reluctance (gay marriage, Plan B).
Even the end of the war in Iraq was offset by escalation in Afghanistan, efforts to tame the intelligence agencies were offset by clemency and more droning. Everything is a balancing act, where progressive aims are pursued under the cover of something else. It has to be this way because progressives actually don’t have enough power to control the Democratic Party, let alone Congress.
You talk about the damage done by subterfuge, but this subterfuge allows people like Baucus and Tester and Pryor and Hagan and Manchin and Landrieu to survive while mainly voting with the president.
Magical thinking. Nothing more.
If Obama is the magic president, nothing he does is wrong, exactly. You just have to wait to see the end of the trick.
Partisan “thinking.” Sad. I guess if you can excuse American exceptionalism and economic imperialist wars you can excuse anything.
Sad.
AG
AG, Obama has pulled the United States out of one economic imperialist war, and is in the process of pulling us out of another.
Bullshit.
He has just changed the costume of the PermaWar. Strategically, we are in exactly the same position that has led us into every war since Korea…militarily enforced economic imperialism driven by the totally false notion of American exceptionalism. Tactically? Maybe he’s doing a better job than his predecessors, but a better job doing bad things to others for profit is not a better job as far as karma is concerned.
The chickens always come home to roost.
Bet on it.
Always.
AG
Yes, AG, U.S. corporations are doing HUGE business all over Iraq and Afghanistan. What a bonanza!
I’d concede the fantasists who dreamed up this war had hopes that we would gain compliant client states out of these wars, but that hasn’t really happened, and Obama wasn’t willing to drag us and our military through more Friedman Units in fruitless searches for unicorns. It would be healthy for your credibility to concede this.
I’d also note that karma is not what you seem to think it is. Karma is not something you use to dream up fateful revenge on those you oppose.
Sometimes it’s correct, but as tarheel says it’s just bluffing. On this issue I call bullshit tho. You just want to believe it because it validates your view of the president.
Or you don’t want to believe it because it rebuts your view of the President.
You know, some of us have been saying that his posturing on this was phony all along.
Obama having two daughters coming into sexual awareness. And acting like an asshole Dad about it.
Or maybe not.
Freedom of the Press in America
If peaceful protests continue to be treated as a threat to our security, and the militarization of the police follows its trend, we’ll see the day when journalists have to embed with the police in order to cover events like this without being harmed themselves.
Ordinarily, I’d call bullshit just like seabe. However, in THIS congress, you don’t need magic thinking to realize the ANYTHING up to and including tasty bacon will be automatically opposed by the R’s.
I don’t know about 11D chess, bluffing is a better analogy. But it is working.
And if the courts DID agree with the DOJ’s arguments? Well, then the first time an R president decided to go after the drug, it would have been banned for ALL women.
As far as Obama was concerned, it is a win-win-win.
The R’s can have my tasty bacon when they pry it from my cold dead hands!
It’s not just your conclusions that I disagree with. I don’t see any evidence that you consider the best counterarguments before you arrive at your position. For example, even if I grant every point that you make above, there’s more than the one result of the President’s purported approach that you mention. Namely, he loses trust and credibility among both his base and his opponents, his base expends energy and resources fighting his position, he contributes to the erosion of a public debate among informed citizens, he sets a precedent for future Republican Presidents to dismiss science-based policy. The case has to be made that the result that you tout is worth more than these results combined, and you’ve done nothing of the sort.
I don’t know what to think any more, except that it’s getting more and more difficult for you to write posts extolling President Obama amid all the posts denigrating our opposition.
We’re heading into an election in which gaining the majority in the House is the most important thing we can do. I urge you to use whatever influence you have to persuade Obama and our party to get on the right side of the issues, and now, before our profound disappointment in him translates into low mobilization and turnout at the polls.
It should be pointed out to anyone who believes this (I don’t) that they have no business whatsoever complaining when progressives criticize Obama, since that’s an essential step in the process.
Actually, the essential step is to criticize the position.
But, hey, if you want to be wrong over and over for the team, go right ahead.
Indeed it is.
HA!! I love what you did there.
Not all criticism is the same, of course.
The trick is to gin up opposition to the policy without damaging Obama in a way that weakens him vis a vis the Republicans.
The AARP did a good job during the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling episodes. They ran ads lauding Medicare and warning darkly about “some in Congress” who would cut benefits. None of those ads contained a word along the lines of “Barack Obama is a terrible person and we shouldn’t support him because both sides are exactly the same.”
The point is, you can better handle the liberalization of gay rights issues, for example, if gay rights groups are bashing you over the head every step of the way. You can weather charges that you’re anti-parent easier if you’re fighting for parents’ right to control their children’s fertility. You can better overcome the argument that you’re a socialist if your health care plan is being bashed by single-payer advocates.
Progressive criticism is an essential part of Obama’s playbook.
Hippie-punch-taking?
Then why are so many folks trying to smother the hippie punches? And why are so many hippies giving up in despair?
I don’t really know what you’re talking about.
I don’t think that I try to smother hippies. Rather, I try to explain how politics actually work, and it involves hippies being hippies. You can be witting or unwitting. I aim to make you witting.
If there is anything to despair, it’s that we are about two inches from nuclear annihilation if the Republicans get back in the White House again before they go through some kind of transformation back to reality.
Don’t take my comment personally. It really does not apply to you. But it certainly did apply to Rahm Emanuel when he was chief-of-staff. And it does apply to some supporters of the President.
There is a faction of the Democratic Party that very much wants to smother hippies. In too many places they have been in control and have succeeded in creating failure as a result.
Given the direction of some Democrats, we might be three inches from nuclear annihilation if they get control of policy absolutely. The Scoop-o-nauts are still out there.
Do you apply the same analysis to Bill Clinton’s policies, vis-a-vis, welfare, trade, and banking? Was his chess on the 11th dimension?
Triangulation only required 2 dimensions.
Bill Clinton, like any president, had to work with the Congress he had, not the Congress he might wish to have had.
However, he was very clearly interested in transforming the Democratic Party into a much more business-friendly organization. His first priority was NAFTA. He ran on welfare reform. He used his second term to pass one pro-Wall Street bill after another. The legislation was not exactly what he would have created if he had a free hand, but it wasn’t anything he opposed or he wouldn’t have signed it. Bill Clinton was an emissary of the Democratic Leadership Council, and his work product reflects that. However, if he hadn’t lost Congress in 1994, his record would look a lot more liberal than it does in reality.
The truth is, Clinton was an Arkansas Democrat. He was probably a little more liberal than your average Blue Dog, but not much more. Obama is a big city liberal and a person of color. These two presidents are starting from very different places, but political realities draw them together.
The truth is, Clinton was an Arkansas Democrat. He was probably a little more liberal than your average Blue Dog, but not much more. Obama is a big city liberal and a person of color.
Obama is a big city liberal? In what universe? He, like both Bill and Hillary Clinton, are Wall Street Democrats. Those are just the facts. All three believe in the privatization game. One other thing, how often did W. have to engage in 11-D chess? You know what the flaw of 11-D chess is? You spend too much time fighting intra-party battles instead of kicking the Pukes ass.
Wall Street Democrat:
Big City Liberal:
See the difference?
Aside from ignoring 1993-1996?
And what was traded to get those bills through Congress?
And since the Republicans took control of the House, how many pro-Wall Street bills has the president signed?
Other than the free-trade agreements, I’d say the answer is zero. How many are in the works? Again, I’d say zero.
And, in ignoring Clinton’s first term, I ignored NAFTA.
Obama has no record of doing anything like the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act or the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 or the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act or the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act or the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. And he has no plans to do anything like that.
And since the Republicans took control of the House, how many pro-Wall Street bills has the president signed?
Other than the free-trade agreements, I’d say the answer is zero. How many are in the works? Again, I’d say zero.
I see you forget the regulatory agencies. Or his cabinet appointments. And you claim that he’s a big city liberal just because he passes the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay act? To us, that’s a BFD. To Wall Street, that’s peanuts.
You mean regulatory agencies like the Financial Consumer Protection Bureau?
You know, we can still go back and read previous comments.
Only the Ledbetter Act, eh? That’s was all the backup for BooMan’s argument, eh?
Scroll scroll scroll. Nope.
And what was traded to get those bills through Congress?
Wait wait wait – so now being willing to trade something in order to get what you want gets you less credit for wanting what you got?
Yeah. Silly arguments spawn silly arguments. Clinton and Obama are dealing with entirely different situations. And different forces in their Congressional caucuses. And different Republican scorched earth strategies (although both were scorched earth strategies).
Obama is genius for doing that…LOL http://linkapp.me/SyLTd
The phrase “11 dimensional chess” is only tangentially “deception”. It is more about the motivation behind an action.
Many progressives look at Obama’s moves and think, why is he pulling shit that looks like it is from the Bush playbook? Where is the support for progressive ideas?
The answer is “He’s playing 11 dimensional chess. You cannot understand, young halfling, what the actions of the fey and mighty mean.” And so he blows off the critics in his own base, and continues his descent into neo-conservative governing.
“11 dimensional chess” means that “actions which look Repukeliscum are just really complicated Democratic ideas.” Of course, by now, we know that Obama is going to pull some shit out of his butt, concede prematurely, and get nothing accomplished.
I think there’s another element going on here; the framing of women’s issues.
The Democrats have been kicking ass using the War on the War on Women card. They’ve done this by picking fights over issues that have 80/20 or 70/30 support – issues that even conservative-leaning women in red states support. They’ve built women’s issues, broadly conceived, into a very successful brand.
This is not a popular issue. If there was to be a fight over this issue, the Democrats would probably come off the worse. What’s more, it would give the Republicans a toehold in the cultural issues debate, a way to damage the brand the Democrats depend on so much.
The White House doesn’t want contraception for young teenaged girls to be the poster child.
That’s the gist of it. The problem he faces is that the policy has to prevent forced birth for very young teenagers too. But he had to have judicial branch make this decision. I understand that. But the policy itself is the key point. And it was not clear to advocates until yesterday where policy would end up.
Sometimes I think that some segment of those “advocates” are consciously, even happily, on board with the strategy BooMan describes above.
As Steve LeBonne says, theirs is an important role in the process of making progress happen – and even better, their role doesn’t require them to trim their sails at all, but to advocate loudly for a no-compromise position.
I agree with this. But the appearance of being ignored forces direct action and when this results in repression, folks are going to trim their sails and even collapse.
Fortunately, whenever one of these performances reaches its conclusion – DADT passes exactly as the President intended, the Plan B regs get dropped, the fiscal cliff deal happens without any entitlement benefit cuts – they are quite happy to give themselves the credit, for forcing Obama to do their bidding through the awesome power of internet outrage and giant puppets.
There’s a diary on the GOS wreck list at this very moment, declaring this decision to be a victory that progressives scored over the Obama administration.
How does your theory of 11-Dimensional Chess explain Obama’s insistence that the pharmaceutical company have “marketing exclusivity”?
You have to choose your battles.
On the other hand, how does marketing exclusivity rebut his theory?
That point seems to be neither here nor there.
Oh, that has nothing to do with chess of any dimension. That’s about money man, the rich and the powerful…they play a chess game too that Obama admires greatly: take the cash and run. He would never really tilt the boat in that respect. He has no plans in that direction. I found it disgusting how he trotted out his daughters to make a point about parental authority. He did the same regarding Palestine to add a personal note to his appeal about nothing when in fact his daughters belong to the absolute 0.0001% of most privileged children in the world. Even his children are props in his political stage set.
In order for your theory to have credibility, you would have to show 1) that this is the outcome they wanted all along, 2) that they knew the courts would overturn their decision, and most importantly 3) that there is real evidence that their actions would have a net positive political outcome for them.
Maybe the evidence exists, but you haven’t provided it, beyond the implied assumption that antagonizing the base is always a good policy, which I don’t think you really want to say.
Because an alternative argument is just as good at this point. It’s that the administration antagonized the base for no good reason. I see no reason to think that the plan B issue was a particular vulnerability. You haven’t provided it. And the administration also engaged in anti-science posturing, which they should rightly avoid on principle.
the best evidence in support of my theory can be seen by looking at how badly-argued that case was and how much ridicule they invited from the judge.
That’s very flimsy evidence. The case was badly argued because there was no good way to argue it.
What is harder to believe?
You will believe any conspiracy theory that makes the president look bad. But you won’t believe one that is obvious as the nose on your face.
Obama used Sebelius to kick this past the election. That’s it. It’s not even complicated.
What have conspiracies to do with it? I simply believe that Obama, as an individual, is evil and pathologically dishonest and unprincipled, with few or no redeeming qualities. No conspiracy involved at all.
That you invoke the “conspiracy theory” idea here shows that you think about these matters with your emotions and imagination, instead of logically and based on evidence.
But not pathologically dishonest enough to say one thing while doing another?
If you see Obama as evil, you either are a wee bit insane or you are aren’t being sincere about your political philosophy.
The only Americans I know who think the guy is evil are far right-wing Republicans and a few far-left people who just think every American president is evil.
Either Obama is evil, or he isn’t. The nationality of the person making that evaluation shouldn’t matter.
Your restricting the range of observers to Americans shows that you are engaged in patriotic bombast, no different from the Bushies.
Lots of Americans see Obama as evil. You are simply unable to relate at all to anyone who is to the left of John Kerry or Samantha Power. To quote from a recent Counterpunch piece:
That reason for voting for Obama was given by progressives and liberals very frequently in 2008 and 2012. In fact, that’s probably the main reason that non-Clintonite Democrats voted for Obama.
So when you say that essentially only right-wingers think Obama is evil, you’re being completely disingenuous.
To proponents of the 11-D chess theory, antagonizing the base is alternately inconsequential, intended, or the chosen result of irrational liberals (when the antagonism leads to low turnout at the polls). It’s a theory that if true would be based on extreme hubris and a contempt for democratic processes among people who have played the game for too long.
Right, you’re “the base,” and you control democratic politics.
N.C. Moral Monday #6: 84 arrested; Charlotte Observer reporter detained
It’s a first-person diary. Thanks for your courage, MsSpentyouth.
G. K. Butterfield and Bob Etheridge were there. Critical mass is beginning to bring out the politicos. Turnout of 1000.
Single payer is needed cure
Operative word there is “retired”, just like Eisenhower’s Farewell Address.