Captain McCain and Campaign Chess

Ever wonder if you could be a chess grand master? Well, pattern recognition is the skill that most separates them from average players. So let's test yours.

See if this rings a bell: A sudden slowdown in the real estate market triggers a crisis that causes major financial institutions to fail and leaves the U.S. taxpayers with bills of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The hew and cry, as it was from Senator John McCain last week, concerns lax regulators who "violated the public trust" and let "greed, corruption, and lobbyists" prevail.

Very good! That's right, it was the savings and loan crisis of the late '80s. You real grand masters will also recall that scandal featured its own "public trust" and "greed and corruption" invectives, but with one key difference. Then, they were hurled at a group of senators known as the "Keating Five," a charter member of which was the very same Senator McCain.

Not deterred one iota by this irony, McCain now says his physical presence is necessary to solve the current crisis, and so wants to postpone Friday's presidential debate and suspend his campaign to be in Washington. I would be shocked if the Democrats miss the chance to thank him warmly, pointing out how important it is to have someone at the table with personal experience in such matters.

We're not here to replay Keating Five escapades, as delicious as they were (Wikipedia awaits, for those who want a refresher). We can't resist, however, repeating one wonderful line. When Mr. Keating, the key villain, was asked if his contributions bought him favors with the senators, he replied, "I want to say this in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so."

Instead, we're here to point out how predictable it was that the senator would set himself up for what could be counterpunch of the campaign, an issue the Democrats can ride all the way to November 4.

Because McCain and rival Senator Barack Obama actually fit prototypical chess styles quite well, this sort of thing was bound to happen in their game.

McCain is a classic "Romantic-era" player. In fact, he seems a reincarnation of another famous seaman, Captain Evans, a cranky old salt who epitomized the style and who bequeathed the game a popular gambit of the same name. Players like these want to be on the attack 100 percent of the time, love to take chances, and go with their guts rather than overanalyze.

This manly-man, instinctive style was once the only way to play.

Obama, in contrast, is a "Hypermodern" positional player. He is an analytic who prefers big ideas to short-term tactics. This is a more scientific school of play, one that frequently uses "pawn power" to fashion an organization specifically meant to win in the endgame. The key offensive weapon in Hypermodernism is the counterstroke: waiting for the opponent to take a position that looks good at first, but which contains a fatal flaw to exploit.

So seems McCain's blast-from-the-past that S.E.C. Chairman Christopher Cox has personally "betrayed the public trust:" It's a direct echo of charges against Edwin Gray, then head of the F.H.LB.B., for buckling to McCain and the Keating Five.

But no matter! Fearlessly, the Captain presses the attack, now with ploys over the presidential debate, even as it's revealed that a key aide was on Freddie Mac's lobbying payroll until it folded, contrary to assurances from just days before.

Wow. Well, maybe the Democrats will overlook this golden chance, remind the public of McCain's role in the last debacle, and hang him with three labels at once: hypocritical old insider. But with a Hypermodernist on the other side of the board, I wouldn't bet on it.

by Bob Rice

Bob Rice is the author of Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, and the former C.E.O. of a tech startup. He now runs merchant bank Tangent Capital, which he founded in 2005.

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