Getting Screwed: A Layman's Guide to Political Strategy

Getting Screwed:

A Layman's Guide to Political Strategy

Revision 2015.09.29

By Kevin Grant

Copyright Kevin Grant 2015

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition License Notes:

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, then please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Notes about the Cover Art

Note 1

The painting appearing in the cover image is titled The Coronation of Napoleon. It was painted by Jacques-Louis David, on a commission from Emperor Napoleon I of France, between 1805 and 1808. The image of the painting was downloaded from the website of the Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org) and is in the public domain.

Note 2

The small image appearing in the lower left hand side of the cover is in two layers. The lower layer is a reproduction of the American Bill of Rights. The image was modified by the author to improve sharpness, adjust color, and create a more 3 dimensional appearance. The image was downloaded from the website of the National Archives (www.archives.gov) and is in the public domain.

Note 3

The image of the quill pen on the lower right hand side of the cover was modified by the author, in order to add transparency, from an image in a source file called Quill_pen.png. This file was downloaded from the website of the Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org), uploaded by BWCNY. The following (quoted) copyright information was included on the Wikimedia Commons page with the original image, when last checked in August of 2015.

"This work has been released into the public domain by its author, BWCNY at the English Wikipedia project. This applies worldwide.

In case this is not legally possible:

BWCNY grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law."

Note 4

The image of the small crown on the lower left hand side of the cover was modified by the author, in order to add transparency, adjust color, and create a more 3 dimensional appearance, from an image in a source file called Ströhl_Heraldischer_Atlas_t15_5.jpg. This file was downloaded from the website of the Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org), uploaded by Tiergärtner. The original image was a reproduction of a page from a book called Heraldischer Atlas, written by Hugo Gerhard Ströhl in 1899. The following (quoted) copyright information was included on the Wikimedia Commons page with the original image, when last checked in August of 2015.

"The author died in 1919, so this work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 90 years or less.

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1923.

This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights."

Dedications

To my parents, Heloise and Newton Grant (June 25, 1924 - March 22, 2015).  What can one say about the perfect (okay, nearly perfect) parents, particularly in a world where bad parenting seems to have become the norm?  You can't.  An infinity of words wouldn't be enough.  Thank you.

To my brother, David Lee Grant (August 12, 1961 - August 3, 2007).  For as far back as I can remember, my brother was a man who lived goodness every day of his life, in a way that I've never seen in anyone else.  The world is a lesser place without him.

To my sister-in-law Karen and her husband Lee Anderson.  I know that God is always in their hearts and Jesus lives in everything they do.  Also, Karen writes and sings both gospel and Christian jazz, and you should check out her CDs at http://www.karengrant.com/welcome.html.

To Diane Kron.  For some friendships you don't have to say anything.  Plus, it makes for a much more interesting mystery when someone comes along 100 years later and says I wonder what was going on there?

Table of Contents

Notes about the Cover Art

Dedications

Introduction

Chapter 1: Strategic and Tactical Considerations

1.01: Analysis

1.02: Planning

1.03: Methods

1.04: Communication

1.05: Influencing

Chapter 2: The Politician's Playbook

2.01: Acquiring Power for the Government

2.02: Avoiding Blame

2.03: Avoiding Embarrassment

2.04: Damaging Rivals

2.05: Damaging Industries

2.06: Gathering Public Support

2.07: Improving Your Image

2.08: Increasing Spending

2.09: Influencing Public Opinion

2.10: Neutralizing Rivals

2.11: Passing Legislation

2.12: Miscellaneous

Chapter 3: The Petitioner's Playbook

Conclusion

Appendix: Skinnerian Politics

About the Author

Website and Other Works

Endnotes

Introduction

Have you ever played a game called Diplomacy? Or perhaps Risk? Like a lot of males I went through a gaming phase during my high school years. At that time, Diplomacy and Risk were popular war games in which a number of players contended for world domination. It wasn't until later in my life, after I started paying attention to real-world politics, that I realized that most politicians behave as if they're playing a game with our country. A political game in which the good of the people is of no real importance, and the ultimate goal for the player is to amass as much power as possible, and to keep it for as long as possible.

The details of the goal differ for each player. Elected officials want to achieve as high an office as possible and to be reelected until they choose to retire. The party machines (like the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee) are like shadow governments that stand behind the politicians, pulling their strings and occasionally having their strings pulled in return. Because they control so much of the money that buys elections they probably have more power than the politicians do, which is unfortunate because the electorate has no real power over them at all. Bureaucrats are a lot like politicians, only they're appointed by politicians rather than elected by us. Most of them have far less power than politicians, but they also take far less risk. For example, it doesn't matter what they do wrong, we rarely find out about it, or could figure out which of them was responsible if we did. If we do figure it out, and insist that they be punished, then they just get side-shuffled into new positions, often with higher pay as a reward for taking a hit for the higher-up for whom they were doing the dirty deed. And of course there's always the usual rogues gallery of special interests, including corporations, unions, and lobbyists, continually pouring money and influence into the system in return for whatever they can get out of it. Their reward generally takes the form of money or autonomy taken from us. For all of the players success requires big government, which means big budgets and massive over-regulation, which means high taxes and loss of freedom for you and me.

And so the game goes on, forever. This game isn't unique to America. It's called politics, and it's been going on for as long as humans have been forming groups to enhance their survival. The game has many aspects, such as Economics and Culture. It has many variations, such as Aristocracy and Democracy, and even the Grand Game, in which many different countries, each playing its own variant, interact. Each variation has its own rules. As of the most recent count there are roughly 7 billion players, each with his or her own goals, and the game board is far more complex than any single human mind can comprehend. It's rarely boring, although most of us would probably be far happier if it was.

Most pawns, like you and me, have no idea how to play, to the extent that we're allowed to see the game at all. That's why we're pawns, and usually sacrificed for personal advantage by some bishop or rook whom we'd dearly love to strangle, if only we knew who they were and could get away with it. But that rarely happens. The higher ups protect each other from us because if they didn't then they wouldn't be protected in turn. And in the final analysis they're not so much competing with each other as they are with us, because the real rewards of the game for them are to acquire as much money and/or power as possible, and that can only be taken from us. This is because fiat money, which is all we have today, is only a symbol for work, and power is the ability to make you do a certain kind of work, and we pawns are the workers. So in the end it all has to come from us.

Not being a happy pawn I decided to create a plausible excuse for all of the time that I've wasted over the years in politics-watching and write a book about the game. So that after each political machination, pawns like you and me (or at least those of you who have so wisely read this book) can look at each other intelligently and say things like He's using the Weeping Widow play again! Doesn't he realize that that play loses its effectiveness if it's used too often? Which, even if it doesn't make anything better for us, at least lets us sound a lot more sophisticated about it and makes for much more impressive bar-room conversation than Did you see the Lakers game last weekend?. Also, if enough people learn enough about the game then it will weaken the stronger pieces, even if we pawns don't have much money or power of our own to play with. This is because so much of the game depends on their fooling us about what's going on. If they can't fool enough of us then their plays don't work as well.

Which brings me back around to this book. This book is a compendium of much of what I've learned about the game so far. If it proves popular enough, and I learn more, then I'll probably eventually do another edition with new material added. Please keep it by your TV (or at least keep the e-Reader that it's stored on by your TV) and use it as a reference every time you think you see a politician doing something that you recognize as part of the game. And if you ever become a bishop or rook yourself then never forget where you came from, and always play for the little guy.

Kevin Grant

Slidell, Louisiana

Chapter 1: Strategic and Tactical Considerations

 Most people, including me, lack the kind of aptitude, experience, training, or position that would enable us to understand or influence events taking place in the political world.  This is one of the reasons why so many of us tend to avoid politics.  We believe ourselves unable even to adequately understand what's going on, let alone to do something about it, and in this belief most of us are probably correct.  Yes, many of us vote, but we do so from positions of such ignorance that we're lucky if we can connect the dots between candidate and policy to the point where we can willfully support someone who will actually operate in our best interests, if there even is such a person.

Most politicians' reelection is so assured as to make it unnecessary for them to be concerned about what we do or don't want them to do on our behalf.  Idealists, hearing this, will say That's not true! Every vote counts!  In doing this they're violating a very important ethical consideration, that a destructive truth is preferable to a constructive fiction.  In parliamentary politics there are what are known as safe seats.  An example of a safe seat would be a Congressional office such that the incumbent was so popular, or his district so dominated by voters from his own party, that even the best efforts of the opposition will yield no significant chance of his being unseated.  Politicians in these seats know that they have a great deal of leeway in satisfying their own policy-making desires, as they're unlikely to suffer any negative political consequences for doing so. [Adams140522]  How likely do you really think it is that the Democratic incumbent in the House seat for the California district that contains San Francisco is going to be unwillingly ousted, under almost any conceivable set of circumstances?  And if this is the case, don't even idealists have the obligation to say publically that if you're from California district 12 then your vote really counts very little, if at all no matter how bad they think that the consequences of this admission will be?  Or, to put it bluntly, we're stuck with Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) until she decides to retire.

As of the time of this writing (September 2013), the University of Virginia Center for Politics' (www.centerforpolitics.org) latest analysis has 363 of the House's 435 (approximately 83.4%) seats as safe seats, while the Cook Political Report (www.cookpolitical.com) puts the number of safe (they use the term solid) seats at 369 (approximately 84.8%).  So at the moment, between 16% and 17% (or about 1 in 6) of House seats are likely to be up for grabs in 2014, and many of those lean strongly in one direction or another, they just don't lean far enough to be considered safe.  So wherever you are now, there's about a 1 in 6 chance that you're Representative's seat isn't safe.  And these kinds of figures are fairly normal for American politics.

How much can you find out about the contents of closed-door meetings between Congressmen and the special interests who donate to their campaigns, which contents really determines Congressional policy making?  How much time and money can you afford to donate to somebody's campaign, or party, as measured against the amount that can be donated by a business or union whose revenues are measured in the millions?  Being realistic about it, most of us really are perpetually locked into the role of the political outsider, forever unable to find out what's really going on, and forever unable to do anything effective about it if we did.  Nothing that I can do is going to change this situation.  But what I can do is to give you a small leg up on figuring out what you can do to make whatever involvement you're forced into having with the government a little more productive.  Following is a collection of short discussions on some strategic and tactical considerations that you might want to take into account when the time comes, divided into subcategories for easier digestion.

Section 1.01: Analysis

 The following topics relate to analyzing what you read and see on TV and the internet about politics. Keep them in mind while watching the news and listening to pundits, and they may help you find your way through the cloud of garbage that most politicians throw up to prevent you from understanding what's really going on.

Emergent Conspiracies

There are many intelligent and informed people in the world who, observing world events, find it plausible to conclude that one or more of these events were the result of conspiracies.  There are also many intelligent and informed people in the world who don't.  Then there's emergent behavior.

Emergent behavior is a term used in the field of computer science.  It refers to seemingly intelligent behavior exhibited by a group, resulting from unintelligent behavior exhibited by the members of that group.  One example of this would be the flocking behavior of birds.  Some people, seeing the inverted-V pattern typical of a flock of flying birds, imagine that it's the result of some intelligence on the part of the birds.  In fact it's nothing of the sort.  Each bird is really obeying a very simple behavioral tendency towards positioning itself in a certain fashion relative to other, nearby birds when it's flying.  The cumulative effect when many birds are so positioning themselves simultaneously is to produce the inverted-V patterns that we see.

If this isn't convincing then consider the elegant patterns created by groups of ice crystals when they aggregate to form snowflakes.  Obviously ice crystals aren't intelligent, and follow simple imperatives regarding intermolecular forces when it comes to aligning themselves with other ice crystals.  Nevertheless, collectively they create patterns far more elegant and complex than those exhibited by birds.  But because they're only ice crystals we're unable to ascribe even the slightest intelligence to them, as we might be tempted to do with birds, if only because birds are living creatures like ourselves.  Note that this isn't to say that birds don't exhibit some degree of intelligence, only to say that flocking patterns aren't evidence of it.

Similarly, in human society we find instances where the uncoordinated activity of many people can appear coordinated, even when the people involved are only acting in their own self-interest, relative to the current environment.  For example, businesses that compete with each other to provide a similar good in the same market usually sell the good at approximately the same price.  To someone unfamiliar with markets this might seem to be evidence of coordinated activity.  But in most cases it's the result of simple economics.  When the good is a mass-produced commodity, created by means of a mature technology, then business-specific patents and innovations are unlikely to have much effect on the means of production.  This means that all of the producers are likely using similar technology to produce the goods, with similar costs, and similar imperatives not to let their competitors undersell them in the market.  Unsurprisingly, they wind up charging similar prices.  So is the similarity of prices evidence of a conspiracy (what we would call price fixing)?  It's always possible, but in the case that I've described it isn't likely.

I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't any conspiracies in the world.  I'm not even trying to suggest that there aren't any large ones.  Only that it's dangerous to wander too far into either camp, either seeing conspiracies behind every tree or refusing to consider that they exist at all.  A better approach would be to examine every situation on its own merit, being careful to consider the various ways in which, among other things, examples of emergent behavior can appear to be conspiracies.

Judge Them by Their Fruits

When considering politicians and political activity, outsiders chronically make two mistakes.  First, they believe what they're told, even when the message comes directly or indirectly from the very politicians whose actions they're considering.  Second, they believe that politicians are stupid, thus providing the politicians with convenient, career-saving excuses for acting in what appears to be a radically counterproductive fashion.  Probably the most common example of this is the ever-present they just don't understand how the economy works.  Hint: usually they do.  They're not doing what they do because they're stupid; they're doing it because it's likely to precipitate the outcome that they want.  Whether or not you want the same outcome is irrelevant to them, as long as they stay in office.  So they just do whatever they want, and allow you to self-generate convincing excuses for them that won't get them kicked out of office.  They're happy to let you think that they're stupid, because many people will happily vote for a stupid person.  If you decided that they wanted to force a socialist economy on you then you (and a lot of other people) would be fighting ten times harder to get them out of office.  So when considering legislation, ask yourself the following three questions.  What were the actual consequences of this legislation?, Who benefitted from the actual consequences of this legislation and how?, and Assuming that the politicians who pushed this were unethical geniuses, what was their real agenda?

Some Examples

For example, as of the time of this writing we've had several attempts at large-scale government subsidization of so-called green energy development.  I've yet to hear of any significant positive results from all of this spending.  In fact, many of the companies that got money from these programs went bankrupt.  But, according to the press, large sums of money were pumped into companies in which large-scale campaign donors/bundlers/whatever to the current administration were heavily invested; donors who made nice profits and then sold their stakes in the companies before they collapsed.  So now we can answer our questions.  What were the actual consequences of this legislation?  Answer: To transfer large amounts of tax revenue into the coffers of small, green energy development companies.  Who benefitted from the consequences of this legislation and how?  Answer: People who bought stock in the subsidized companies while stock prices were still low (before the subsidies were publically announced), and then sold their stake while stock prices were still high (before the bankruptcies were announced).  And Assuming that the politicians who pushed this were unethical geniuses, what was their real agenda?  Answer: To pay off political cronies and supporters by providing them with insider information about the subsidies and bankruptcies in advance of the public announcements, allowing them to profit greatly by buying and selling stock at the appropriate times.

Note (at least in order to prevent me from being sued), that I'm not suggesting that everybody who made money off of these companies was doing anything illegal, or that any specific individual was doing anything illegal, even those with direct connections to the current administration.  What I'm saying is that you need to ask these questions, and when it comes to judging politicians it makes a lot more sense for you to assume the worst.

Every time that you attack government funding of green-technology-related corporations on the basis that those politicians are so stupid that they don't even understand that windmills will never generate as much power as nuclear power plants!, you're just providing them with convenient cover.  Do you really think that they don't know that?  Can they tie their own shoes?

Here's another example.  There's now far more than enough data to make it obvious that private ownership of guns and concealed carry reduces crime, while excessive gun control and gun free zones increase it.  While the liberal media often publicizes misleading figures, do you think that liberal politicians, who have their own research staffs and expert advisors, don't get the real ones?  Do you think that both they and their expert advisors are too stupid to understand them?  Let's get even more specific.  In both legislation and public presentations today, liberal politicians frequently misuse the emotionally loaded phrase assault weapon to describe almost any gun that they want to ban.  Many knowledgeable people have commented publically on the fact that the term assault weapon has no specific meaning that would allow it to be used in such a fashion.  The only class of weapons to which you can reasonably assign that term is fully automatic weapons (for the gun-challenged, think machine guns), which are already banned and have been for quite a long time.  Do you think that there are any liberal politicians left today who haven't been corrected on that point ad-nauseam?  Do you think that they're such cretins that they're incapable of understanding the correction?  Including even those politicians whom we know have owned, or at least handled, guns themselves?  Says Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA):

 I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself because that's what I did. I was trained in firearms. I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick. I carried a concealed weapon and I made the determination if somebody was going to try and take me out, I was going to take them with me. [Schoffstall121219]

 Do you think that Senator Feinstein, champion of both successful and unsuccessful assault weapon bans, doesn't understand how she's misusing the term?  Politicians aren't misusing the term because they're stupid or ignorant; they're deliberately misusing it because it's an emotionally loaded term that enhances the impact of their message.

When it comes to gun control, one of the fruits of the pro-gun-control politician's efforts is increased crime rates.  Given that they must know this, we should stop wasting our time in false accusations of stupidity, judge them by the fruits of their labor, and instead ask either why the politicians want increased crime rates, or what else they plan to gain from excessive gun control.

One final quote to illustrate the point.  In a recently released report about fixes to the Obamacare website, the Obama administration writes:

"While there is more work to be done, the team is operating with private sector velocity and effectiveness, and will continue their work to improve and enhance the website in the weeks and months ahead." (emphasis mine) [Norman131201]

Do you think that our Liberal politicians, like those in the Obama administration, aren't perfectly aware that capitalism and free enterprise, i.e. the private sector, are faster and more efficient than the government at solving problems?  Look at our latest health care scandal, government mishandling of the Veteran's Administration health care system and all of the unnecessary waiting, suffering, and dying that have resulted from that (an issue that veterans have been complaining about for as long as I can remember). [Bronstein140501]  If the government can't manage a health care system for such a comparatively small subset of the population then why would you think that they can manage a health care system for the entire population?  And don't you think that they're just as aware of their shortcomings in this regard as you are?

Instead of accusing the government of being too stupid to understand how the economy works, we should be asking why they're deliberately adopting approaches that they know to be sub-optimal.  In other words, what are they getting out of it that they don't want to admit to?

Follow the Money

In the final analysis, despite the genuinely good intentions of some politicians, most politics is about money, power, and getting reelected.  This being the case, one powerful tool in determining what's going on is to follow the trail of transfers of money and/or power.  Assume that where political activity has the effect of transferring money or power that this is the intended effect of the activity, not an unintended side-effect or the result of ignorance or incompetence on the part of the people involved.  Be realistic enough to realize that this assumption may not be true, but accept it temporarily to see where it leads.

Know the Players

Before you can make plans regarding your political activities you have to know who the players are.  The importance of this can be seen by looking at a real-world test case, the oft-touted two state solution to the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine.  For those who aren't familiar with the situation, or the term, there's a place in the Middle East where two states/cultures exist; one called Israel, and one called Palestine.  Their lands are adjacent and there's a lot of disagreement over who has the rights to what.  For the sake of brevity, and also to avoid as much bias as possible on my part, I'm skipping several mountains worth of history and details (full disclosure: I believe that I have a pro-Israel bias, and you'll probably see it throughout the book).  They fight about it a lot.  Periodically people propose what's called a two state solution, which generally involves some scheme for them dividing up the land and living side-by-side, happily ever after.  The proposals are invariably rejected, after which everybody spends a while talking about how unreasonable one or the other side (or both) were in rejecting it, and then the whole thing starts all over again with more fighting.  Over the decades there have been many attempts at diplomatic solutions to the problem, all of which have failed.

In fact, unless there's a major change in regional politics, no treaty-based solution will succeed regardless of who proposes what kind of treaty.  There are players in the game other than the Israeli and Palestinian people and their governments.  These include local and non-local terrorist groups and the governments of other countries in the Middle East.  Most of the real power rests in the hands of these other players, and it's not in their interests for peace to be achieved.  Leaders of terrorist groups like Hamas and Fatah have spent decades embezzling funds from foreign aid (mostly from America), something that they'd have a lot more trouble doing if the area were to settle into a two state solution with a working government on the Palestinian side.  So effectively the American, and other, governments have been paying both past [Samuels050901], and present [Toameh100129], [Toameh100223], leaders of terrorist groups, and what passes as a Palestinian government, to keep the problem existent.  Some of this money eventually finds itself in the hands of some of the rank-and-file terrorists too. [Schwartz131111a], [Schwartz131118], [Schwartz140213]  Recently this has even had the interesting effect of inspiring a debt-ridden Palestinian man to fake a terrorist plot, just to get arrested and get some of the money for himself. [Schwartz140217]  The terrorist groups themselves would be partially, and then completely, marginalized if peace broke out.  The local clerics and the governments of various Arab states would lose an enemy whose presence they've been able to use for years as a focus for societal hatred, and thus a source of personal political gain.  Iran would lose the ability to use the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as the basis of a proxy war against the West.  And so forth.  All of these players are more powerful than the Palestinian government and people combined, and there's nothing that can be offered to them that's worth as much as what they gain from having the current situation continue; hence the perpetual Palestinian rejection of diplomatic solutions.  Then there's the presence of an even larger circle of players: major nations outside of the Middle East (which very definitely includes the U.S.) with a vested interested in the political balance in such an oil-rich area of the world.

No diplomatic solution will succeed because there's no diplomatic solution possible.  There are too many powerful players with too many conflicting desires for any such solution to exist.  It's to everybody's benefit to propose and argue over diplomatic solutions periodically, because everybody wants the good public image that will come from appearing to be so reasonable.  Or they want some minor advantage that will come from the negotiating itself, like Israel releasing to Palestine a bunch of Palestinians imprisoned for terrorist activities, in order to get the Palestinian government to come to the negotiating table.  But none of these efforts are going to go anywhere in the foreseeable future.

Another example of this is the American Federal Reserve, which is a completely non-governmental organization which was given control of our money supply in 1913.  Shortly before the Great Depression.  Which coincidence should tell us something about the importance of knowing the players.  From the book End the Fed (referenced elsewhere), by ex-Representative Ron Paul (R-TX):

 ...A famous example of this took place when Arthur Burns was chairman of the Fed (1970-1978).  [...] His intervention in politics is indisputable.  Following the election of [President] Jimmy Carter in 1976, he dearly wanted to be reappointed.  He cut the discount rate and accelerated money growth [in order to create a fake economic boom that would benefit the sitting president].  True, he was a Republican, but he wanted to go down in history as bipartisan. [...]

Sadly for Burns, the courtship failed.  Even more sadly for the country, the courtship wrecked the dollar further.  It also wrecked the Carter presidency, as he dealt with the worst bout of price inflation in more than a century.  Finally, the inflation backfired even against the Democrats and brought Ronald Reagan into power.  Such is the lagging effect of shortsighted efforts to manipulate the political environment to benefit particular Fed governors and banking interests."

 And later:

 In the meantime, the Fed's involvement in the 'political business cycle' is a well-documented fact.  The Fed tends to loosen before elections and is far more likely to tolerate downturns between presidential elections and Fed appointments.  This is an open secret in Washington.  We all pretend that the Fed is not a political operation, and yet everyone knows that it is among the most political institutions in the entire government.

 Thus we see that there's at least one major player in the American political game who plays actively, has a self-serving agenda, whose actions have drastic effects on the game board, and whose existence often goes totally unrecognized by the public and even by many members of government: the Federal Reserve.  How much of the financial crisis of the late seventies and early eighties, which we usually blame on then-President Carter, should really be blamed on Burns?  How can you act to make things better if one of the major players on the other side, and its moves, are invisible?  Before attempting to solve a problem, take time out to develop a complete list of the relevant players.

Before I move on to the next section it's probably a good idea for me to quickly mention two closely related considerations.

Know the Game

At each moment during the game, each player will have a set of moves which he can make, goals to which he'll aspire, and constraints (rules) to which he must conform.  The contents of each player's sets may be different and may change over time.  Victory will be easier if you're aware of each player's situation in this regard.

For example, many people are astonished at the lengths to which some politicians will go to win the party nominations for their positions come election time.  In the 2014 congressional primaries Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) spent over $11 million to defeat his Tea Party challenger Matt Bevin, who raised about $3.3 million, leaving himself in a much weaker position against his Democratic opponent in the election. [Martin140520]  Why did he do this?  Because the demographics of most states and congressional districts are such that one party has a significant, predictable advantage in the election.  This is why so many