Guiliani's "Spec"

As a consistent Democrat voter (read "partisan" and proud of it), I was paying no attention to Rudolph Guiliani till Andante in her weblog The Collective Sigh posted a very incisive piece in which she likened him to another man who had once played a major role in her life and whom therefore she knew very well. Thus alerted I saw a second article that pointed out the highly interesting gamble that Rudolph Guiliani is taking in the current election cycle, in which he is foregoing serious efforts in the several "first" states, in favor of saving himself for Florida and then for the thousand pound gorilla, the Super Primaries on 5 February, not even a month from now.

So, also as a voter who has taken little interest in which one of the current frontrunners wins the Democratic nod, because I regard all of them as equally deserving of taking it all, I am paying more attention to Rudolph Guiliani and his strategy than to anything else.

Here then is a hilarious excerpt bearing directly on this, from "Joel's Florida Diary," in "The Trail, A Daily Diary of 2008," that appeared on the Washington Post site today.

... Giuliani's strategy, though unorthodox, is not entirely crazy. He may yet prove to be a genius. He's challenging the Central Dogma of modern presidential politics. That's the one that says you have to spend months campaigning in Iowa amid the corn and soybeans, talking to citizens in towns with names like Stover, Chaffville and Swineburg.

You must drive tractors and cite the virtues of the latest genetically modified seed corn that is capable of growing in outer space. Then, when you Exceed Expectations, you ride your new momentum into New Hampshire, bonding with flinty characters in towns named Squilchem, Flemborough and Scratchy Notch. Your New Hampshire victory will then propel you, with Newtonian certainty, to the nomination.

That's the "retail politics" system, and it has generally worked for many years, bolstered in large part by political reporters who love the candidate-on-the-hay-bale paradigm.

So what else can we say? Nothing except that my gut feeling is that the Republican choice will be either John McCain or Rudolph. None of the others have recognizable faces, except F. Thompson, and he seems to be in the contest only because it was expected of him, and, as a sometimes serious actor in movies, he probably has just enough integrity left to know that that's all horse flops.

In that diary Joel cited an analogy made by somebody, who said that Guiliani's strategy is like a pro football team passing up the entire regular season plus the playoff games, and taking to the field only for the Super Bowl.

I don't think that analogy works. It is too extreme, and instead I offer one from chess. There you have what is called a "speculative sacrifice," in which a piece of value is given up for what at first sight appears to be no obvious advantage and instead could even be a bad mistake, and not until five or six moves later, or sometimes much later, does the point become clear. Of course this doesn't always work, but it is always a stirring thing to see, even when it occasionally happens that the sacrifice works, yet that wasn't the player's intention at all, and instead he had merely been struggling to redeem what he had thought was a blunder.

In any case, in New York City they play a lot of chess.