Don't Want No Scrubs

A few articles on Congress of late have reminded me of a classic article on fighting games: "Playing to Win."  It’s worth reading the whole thing, even for those not interested in fighting games, but here’s some excerpts.

In the world of Street Fighter competition, we have a word for players who aren’t good: “scrub.” Now, everyone begins as a scrub—it takes time to learn the game to get to a point where you know what you’re doing...  In reality, the “scrub” has many more mental obstacles to overcome than anything actually going on during the game... His problem? He does not play to win.

The scrub would take great issue with this statement for he usually believes that he is playing to win, but he is bound up by an intricate construct of fictitious rules that prevent him from ever truly competing. These made up rules vary from game to game, of course, but their character remains constant. In Street Fighter, for example, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” So-called “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone often called cheap... As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that
state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking.  The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield which will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

There is a gray area here I feel I should point out. If an expert does anything he can to win, then does he exploit bugs in the game?... But there is a limit. There is a point when the bug becomes too much. In tournaments, bugs that turn the game off, or freeze it indefinitely, or remove one of the characters from the playfield permanently are banned.

How does this apply to politics?  The answer after the break.

I hate to say it, but based on this string of losses, I’ve got to qualify the Senate Dems as scrubs. It’s important to remember that they’re in a weak position.50 votes plus Lieberman and an actively hostile President. But as Josh Patashrink notes,

But OK, fine, the good guys failed to get 60 votes; that’s the way the Senate works, and I’m sympathetic to the philosophical case for the filibuster. But the farm-bill reformers have to be willing to play this game too. Of the 56 senators who voted for a more rational farm policy, at least 41 should be willing to filibuster the actual farm bill unless some changes are made to it. Things don’t work if only one side is willing to use its leverage to the fullest.

However, the Dems rarely use it (in fairness Mukasey probably wasn’t the place to make the stand, there’s far worse that’s gotten through this Congress).  So how could we start playing to win aside from filibustering their stuff?  Well, we could force them to actually filibuster rather than counting it an automatic loss when we can't get to 60 votes.    There's some disagreement about how achievable it is:

Before making this proposal, I called two of my favorite Smart Guys. Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution calls this idea impractical. Given the fact that Republicans could muster 41 people on most things to hold the floor, a real filibuster could go on interminably: "The bottom line is, the modern Senate can't run without unanimous consent agreements. ...It isn't as if a different strategy would have produced a different outcome." With so much must-pass legislation before him, Mann says, Reid's only real option is to "take your lumps and get it done."

But Norm Ornstein at the American Enterprise Insitute thinks Reid should call the Republicans' bluff, starting with holding the Senate in session five long days a week. "You have a different Senate now. Frankly, they're soft," says Ornstein. "If they had the backbone and the discipline to do it, it would work."

I'm with Ornstein and Ygelsias.  I disagree with Mann and Drum on this one.  We are getting our butt handed to us time and again, it's time to try taking our game to the new level.  Yglesias proposes that we do just break the filibuster entirely.  I'd much prefer letting the Republicans do it, but I'd consider the possibility so long as we first tried this.  Better now than when it would cost a Democratic President political capital. 

Anyways, there is at least one area where Sen. Reid is playing to win, and I want to give proper credit.    He's keeping Congress in session to prevent recess appointments.  That's a good procedural move that will get important results by minimizing the mischief new appointees, who would stay until the end of President Bush's term, could do. It's also a new trick.  I just hope the Senator can start to bring the rest of his game up to that level.