I bet Obama has played go. It's a guess without direct evidence, but his campaign against Clinton looks like go strategy pitted against chess strategy.
He grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, and studied law in Cambridge MA; anybody know if he learned to play in any of those places?
It just seems his style. I wrote something about it a month or so ago on the political blog dailykos; the style has come through even stronger since then.
I have no idea whether Obama knows how to play, or even knows the game at all.
I must commend you on an excellently written piece though, putting Scott Boorman's "The Protracted Game" into the context of the US presidential elections like that, very well done!
Thank you for the compliment, I'm glad you liked it, it was fun to write. I was reminded to come back here when I stumbled across the piece on reddit.com -- pretty far down the lists, but still very nice to see. My guess is that somebody who saw it here put it there.
TimJ
Herman Hiddema: Guilty as charged ;-)
When engaged in real warfare, as in play, chess players want the center. They focus their forces and fight fiercely to take and hold the big cities. They look for the important figures in the enemy camp and seek to neutralize or coopt them. They get the factories, the weapons, the media.
Go players go out to the fringes. They don't concentrate in one place, and they don't fight where enemy power is strongest. They create new power through organization, they create new structures, new means of communication, loosely at first, then filling in as time goes on, in response to the shape of the game. -- http://tinyurl.com/5t2mnf
Obama has the countryside in Pennslyvania while Clinton has the two cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh?
Clinton has the media working for her, whereas Obama does not?
Clinton is winning the urbanized states such as Ohio, Texas, Arizona, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Nevada ? While Obama is winning the rural states such as Rhode Island, District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, and Connecticut ?
Takemiya doesn't play for the center ?
I don't get it.
If Obama's campaign raises the question, resp. gives the idea that the creator of it played Go - then we should perhaps better ask also David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager
whether he did.
And the answer is: his favorite board game is Scrabble.
David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist' favourite game?
When I wrote the essay linked above, it was more than a month ago, and I was looking at how the campaign had played thus far. I can see how it would be puzzling, read today.
The piece wasn't about Pennsylvania, or about urban vs. rural strength, but rather about (among other things) how Obama's strategy of working for delegates in the unimportant "flyover" states added up better than Clinton's "go for certain critical big states, ignore everything else, they don't vote Democratic anyway" pattern, which is typical of the Democratic Leadership Council. Obama's background in community organizing, and his skillful use of the internet both as an organizing and publicity tool, along with Howard Dean's "50 state strategy" political organizing against central party structures held by the Clintons and the DLC-- these are the kinds of things I meant by building alternate structures.
We're very far advanced in this game, and of course now both campaigns are playing hard in the middle of the board.
To me, Obama seems to be continuing with a go-like approach. Time Magazine says he may have won the ABC debate simply by not losing it. That has a familiar feel to it, and, really, that's all he has to do at this point.