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Playing the Short Stack
In poker, your strategy should vary by how many chips you have in front of you. Every hand, each player is required to ante-up a small amount to stay in the game. If you’re winning, paying the ante is no big deal, and you can afford to play the long game: make safe bets, don’t bluff stupidly, wait for a good hand, and be content to let the ante drive your opponents broke.
If you’re losing, you’ve only got a few chips in front of you. Just putting your ante in the pot every time leaves your bankroll empty after, maybe, eight hands. You can’t afford to wait. You must bet on middling hands and — if necessary — bluff wildly. It’s not a question of winning: you’re playing to stay in the game. Delaying the inevitable loses every time, but making risky plays only loses most of the time; sometimes, it actually leads to victory.
In poker terms, that’s called “playing the short stack.” As a principle of strategy it has applications all over. Look at Putin: if gas prices remain low, the Russian economy will tank. To remain in power, he’ll have to find other ways of making Russians love him, probably by sending tanks where we don’t want them. Look at the Seahawks; they pull out all the trick plays to come back and actually win against my beloved Packers. Look at Herman Cain last election; he wasn’t going to win by being “the boring-but-reliable guy” or even “the boring-but-reliable black guy” so he had to make some waves. He kept shouting “Nine Nine Nine!” so people would pay attention to him. Otherwise he’d just have lost quietly.
Now, look at conservatism in America generally.
Are we losing? The Media is against us. The Federal Bureaucracies are against us. The Culture is against us. The Schools are against us. Barack Obama is against us (okay, point in our favor, but still). We’re at a point in the culture where the assumptions people make are framed the way the liberals want. So yes, we are losing.
I bring this topic up because I see the new Republican Congress playing the long game. They don’t want to fight over this issue, or that issue, because Obama will just veto it anyway and we don’t want to jeopardize the 2016 race. They’re playing the long game, but that’s not how you play when you’re down.
Published in General, Politics
The overarching strategy seems to be as follows:
Knuckle Dragging Base Who Has Nowhere Else to Go + Mythical Independents = Awesome 2016
Based on this, the approach is to poll test every stupid thing against six undecided voters in Ohio. Since one of these six voters will, inevitably, not like a particular bill you end up doing nothing always waiting for the next election.
Unfortunately, contrary to what “strategists” think this results in a good portion of the base not caring and provides no argument for why independents should vote for you.
Excellent post.
I’d say we’ve been playing the short stack since at least 2008. John McCain? Yoish — Sarah Palin was a great bluff until Team McCain made it obvious that’s what she was.
The 2010 and 2014 midterms? Republicans suddenly think they’ve got the chips because the rest of the country sits out the hand?
It’s madness. I agree completely — conservatism is losing and will only recover by taking smart risks based on principle, or by capitalizing on some national/global crisis, which is usually how unprincipled progressives get ahead.
The overarching strategy seems to be as follows:
Republicans play with Their hand exposed and seek a compromise to split the pot.
Unfortunately, contrary to what “moderates” think, this results in losing.
The best center right example of long game right now is Canada’s Stephen Harper. Pretty much every advantage American liberals have goes double for Canadian liberals. But Harper has dominated Canada because he was playing a long game. When he was out of power, his rhetoric was pretty inflammatory, to the point where comparing him to Newt Gingrich made sense. But once he became Prime Minister, he grew in office: not by becoming liberal, but by being bland. The Canadian left was used to portraying the right as a collection of yahoos, and the low key and incremental style Harper has employed has left the left baffled. And Canada is probably the nation in the best fiscal shape in the world now.
Actually, American conservatives really ought to be playing long game. Whatever the tenured radicals say, the facts of life remain conservative. Academia and the media are comic relief. The GOP is doing better in state legislatures than they have since Hoover was president. The right has a farm team that the left would give the soul it doesn’t believe in for. In President Obama and Speaker Pelosi, the left got everything they could have wanted–and they destroyed themselves with short stack policies. We on the right ought not to follow but to learn from their example.
I think you always have to play the long game politically. Looking desperate, being caught bluffing reeks of desperation and is a sure voter turnoff. Look at this latest move with inviting Bibi , it will have negative ramifications for quite awhile, the same with the government shutdown earlier.
Short stack strategies only apply to tournament play, they don’t apply to cash games. The GOP should be playing cash game strategies … play everyone hand with relentless aggression … after all, congress is the equivalent of playing heads-up poker so aggressive strategies are the only way the GOP can win.
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When we say “The facts of life are conservative” what does that imply for strategy? I can say that biology disagrees with gay marriage, but we still lost that fight. I can say that ordinary people know how to make a budget, but that doesn’t stop Congress from borrowing money ad nauseam. If you lay out a problem on an individual scale people will choose self defense over pacifism (generally), but that doesn’t stop Iran from getting an atom bomb.
I agree that the facts of life are conservative, and that these things will reassert themselves. I’d just like for it to happen without a catastrophe in between.
The left is playing to a different strategy; they’re counting on the government ratchet to maintain their gains. Obama got Obamacare, and de-facto amnesty.The left can afford to be out of power for four to eight years now so long as these programs aren’t repealed in the meantime. Eventually they get power back again, and the country is shifted a little further left.
With respect to Mr. Harper, good for him, but are you really arguing that the Republican’s problem to this point is that their leadership isn’t bland and inoffensive enough?
What negative ramifications are you talking about, vis a vis the invitation?
I’ll cop to the shutdown being a short stack play. In that sense I still think it was the correct move. Remember, nobody wants to be playing the short stack. In that particular scenario, if we win we defund Obamacare, which is a big gain for the right. If we lose it’s business as usual. Even though the odds were heavily stacked against us I figure the large potential upside outweighed the small probable downsides.
…Remind me what those worked out to be, will you? I mean, in terms of actual seats lost or critical-to-the-republic programs being defunded.
There are two camps here on Rico. One are the “bomb throwers” (like you, and me sometimes). They tend to like Ted Cruz. The others are the “progress through process” types – JoE and Klaatu come to mind.
I do understand that mindset. There is something to be said for a solid strategy of dismantling the opposition, one brick at a time. However, it requires a good strategy – which seems to have eluded the national GOP, at least in my mind.
Take this Bibi invitation. Yes, there are those who holler. But it makes a point. And it isn’t the one Obama wants to make, nor that Iran wants to hear. But there are more people on that side than against it. So overall, it’s a great move. And there is the bonus that it got Obama’s nose out of shape.
Gay marriage is actually a conservative cause, which is why a significant chunk of the left doesn’t support it. (See a book like Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal—or save yourself some agony and read Jonathan Rauch’s classic review—if you don’t believe me.)
Here are some conservative facts of life:
To quote the late Herbert Stein, “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” The left did a supremely good job at discrediting itself over the last few years because they tried to win everything.
No. The problem with today’s Republican leadership (at least in Congress) isn’t that they’re bland, but that they don’t think. When the conservatives were out of power, Harper transformed the National Citizens Coalition from a lobbying group to what was effectively a small think tank. Everybody paying attention knew Harper’s broad priorities: lower taxes, a stronger military, a smaller welfare state, a balanced budget, no Quebec separatism, closer ties with America, more oil exports.
But Harper didn’t make a complicated, over detailed plan a la Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity. He didn’t want to give the opposition something the chew on. Harper had thought long and hard about his agenda, and once he became PM, he could push for it gradually.
The GOP could afford low key leadership if they had some consistent ideas. But without some overarching vision, no kind of leadership will avail us. Let’s take a hard look at the GOP inconsistencies today:
Yes, the facts of poker are not the facts of life. The facts of politics are not the facts of life. We’re playing politics, not life.
I love that we’re having these conversations now. I was beginning to think it would never sink in.
To use a WWI metaphor, the Right is largely made up of two kinds of people. People who want to charge into machine gun fire in the no man’s land and people who want to stay in the trenches forever and hope something happens.
What we really need are the guys who look at the situation and invent tanks.
For some time, Mike Hubbard has been turning out Ricochet articles that could easily fit in Claremont Review of Books, Commentary, or The Atlantic. He is a serious writer with seriously good ideas of how to win, and what’s worth winning.
Quinn the Eskimo – I think that metaphor works.
My point and Casey’s (not to speak for him, but I will) is we are trying to do what little we can to help build metaphorical tanks. Half the battle is how you position and message. The other side gets this and we stink at it.
For instance, they want to raise taxes on the “rich” and we reflexively say the “rich” already pay a lot of taxes. That may be true, but you are not going to win middle class votes by telling the middle class how good they have it. How about, instead, saying don’t talk to us about raising taxes until you cut the National Bird Migration Fund (it’s a real thing I posted on last week)
Our positioning is the problem, not our policy. For some strange reason we seem to think that a message that works on Ricochet is the best way to message to all Americans.
Thank you, Gary!
I disagree, but I don’t want to fight it out in this thread.
Sure. How long will liberalism remain discredited? Reagan succeeded Carter because Carter discredited liberalism too, but we still have a department of education. Supposing we gain the presidency in ’16. Will we deport illegals by the thousand? Will we repeal Obamacare? Will we cut the IRS down to size? Or ATF? Will we do all of these; in two years, in eight? The problem with the long game is, at some point you’ve got to start winning for it to be worthwhile
Things can stop in more way than one. If it was just a case of liberalism inevitably receding like the tide I’d be content to wait it out, but I don’t believe that tide will recede on it’s own without some catastrophe pushing it along. People can either desire a more muscular foreign policy because they’re tired of the French calling us wusses, or they can change their minds after Iran evitably nukes someone.
Good list of inconsistencies. I’d like to go down them point by point but I’m talking too much already. How do we agree on an overarching vision? I bet you could find Ricochetti to take both sides in every one of those points. If we can’t agree even broadly amongst ourselves, what hope do we have of convincing politicians, who have pressures against a principled stand. How do we assuage a general public who are preemptively hostile towards us?
Metaphors. They come with hazards. In a cash game, when you’re the short stack your best option is to cash out. The Republican Party does not have that option. And even considering politics to be a two-player game, it doesn’t necessarily imply that the aggressive strategy is the best. Generally I would argue the long game is better for politics, but I don’t think we’ve got the position to play it.
Hank, in a cash game, you would never have more than a couple of percent of your bankroll on the table, so, if your stack gets low, you put more money on the table (add chips). Or, if you are card dead and having a bad night, taking a break could be the best option.
To continue your poker metaphor. The GOP is a poker player who is looking for and needs sponsors (voters and donors), but, has proven to be an extremely weak player. A weak player might bluff sponsors for support but over time the reality is there for all to easily see. It gets worse. When the GOP gets to the casino, they mostly don’t even sit down at the poker table, they waste it all playing the slot machines and going to shows.
I think there are problems other than positioning and policy. Republicans try to do something; the presidential surrogates, the press, celebrities, so-called “experts” attack. Obama gets to be above it all and barely gets drawn into the fight. To the extent that Republicans have a national-level leader, it only centralizes the point of enemy fire. Conservatives need strategies that acknowledge the opposition’s strategy and fight it. When we make an argument and the other side makes a counterargument, we need to make a counter-counterargument and not just stand there like deer in headlights. We have to take the arguments we used to win elections and keep making them until legislation becomes law and stop assuming that winning the election is enough. We need to get our argument out in more places than Fox News and talk radio.
Basically, we need a permanent conservative campaign with enough intensity to overwhelm everything the other side is going to throw at us.
Look at you? You had this figured out when a presidential run was just a glimmer in Donald Thrump’s eye!
If Pseudo were here, he’d say, “are you not entertained??” to all us slow learners.