Poker is a simple game. You bet that your cards will beat someone else’s cards, and if they do, you win. Also if they drop out, you win, even if your cards aren’t better. And that’s where the game gets interesting. If all the cards were dealt face-up the game would be pretty dull, and winnings would generally even out. But with the cards face down, the bluff comes into play, and how you bet becomes more important than what you are betting on. A good player can win big with losing cards.
Politics are a lot like poker. You might not have a good position on a policy; your ideas might be real losers; the plans that you’re pushing might be disasters waiting to happen; but if you can spin them right, read a good speech, tell a little lie… you might just be able to bluff your way into winning. You get elected, you pass your rotten legislation, you spread your poisonous ideas… you’re the big winner.
Of course poker is just a game, and though some people try, you can’t bluff your way through life. Reality cannot be bluffed. Politics is also not real life. You might be able to fool even all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool the truth with a lie, even when you’ve fooled yourself. Bluffing doesn’t actually change the cards! There comes a time when all your bogus plans and ideas must face the test of whether they actually live up to the way you’ve spun them. This is the equivalent of showing your cards at the end of the hand, which is something true gamblers will try to avoid when all others have folded, but which politicians can only hope to obfuscate.
Upbeat demeanor, conveying confidence, and ridiculing opponents are tactics employed by poker players and politicians alike. Unfortunately, lying and deception also seem to be shared strategies. In poker, it’s considered to be part of the game, and you wouldn’t be called “good” unless you were adept at fooling people. Hopefully we haven’t come to the place where we consider the same to be true in politics.
President Obama’s bluff is now coming to the light of day. The cards lie face up on the table, and though he took the pot, the cards were clearly losers. You can’t go back in time and take back his winnings, but it should affect how we “play” him in the future. In poker we would call him an aggressive bluffer; in life we call him a liar. You can parse the words, and addend the statements, but only the most naive will continue to excuse his behavior as anything less than intentionally deceptive and manipulative. He did what he felt he had to to get elected, twice. He did what he felt he had to to force through his agenda. What he felt he had to do was neither honest nor transparent, intentionally so, but to him, victory was more important than honor. Such priorities are not uncommon among politicians, but when we realize that this is the case, the future of those politicians needs to change.
IMHO: We have become a nation that no longer demands excellence. Young women accept boorish behavior from the swine they call boyfriends, and young men also allow themselves to be so used. We don’t really expect anyone to do their job well, competence is the exception rather than the rule, we pay our money and shrug our shoulders. The pervasiveness of mediocrity extends throughout our government even to the highest levels. We have a mayor in Toronto whose excuse for lying about smoking crack, was that he was probably too drunk to remember… he’s considering re-hab… considering? But we in the US have had mayors doing cocaine, and we re-elect them. We have governors involved with prostitutes, congressmen sending lewd pictures to young women, a president having an affair in the oval office, lying about it, and still he’s the most popular Democrat in the country. Across parties there have been affairs, lying, bribe-taking, and outright stupidity. We can do better. We must do better. They say we should believe their spin, they say we should trust their words, they say they know what they’re doing… I’m pretty sure they’re bluffing!
