The PresidentAos Disco-play was the most unexpected of this week''s influence strategies

There’s nothing that happens in politics that’s not rooted in influence strategy. And while all political machinations have an end-purpose in mind, the “plays,” – that is, the “stratagems” – used to achieve that purpose are fundamentally unique. (See The Playmaker’s Table for the 25 distinct strategies of political spin.) That being said, Week One of the Obama administration was, as expected, chalk full of strategy.

President Obama’s executive order to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was Preempt —a play from the Attack subclass of The Playmaker’s Table that gives a player a superior advantage or limits a rival’s ability to exploit a weakness. In this case, the Preempt was designed to stay ahead of U.S. critics abroad, who will now have less to criticize and put the Obama administration on the path to winning the moral battle in the war on terror.

Not to be outdone, the president’s appointments of Senator George Mitchell as Middle East envoy and Richard Holbrooke as special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan on Thursday were a two-part play, in this case, a Screen + Preempt . The Screen, a play that resides in the Frame subclass on The Playmaker’s Table, is a strategy that borrows events and symbolic references to advance an agenda. In this case, Messrs Mitchell and Holbrooke both have substantial peace accomplishments on their resumes, the former in brokering the Good Friday Peace Deal in Northern Ireland, and the later in writing the Dayton Peace Accords, which brought an end to the Bosnian Wars of the 1990s. The Screen on the envoys’ experience and diplomatic success, coupled with the Preempt of aggressively pursuing these two issues in his first week in office, give Mr. Obama a powerful strategy-baseline to pursue his agenda in the Middle East and in South Asia.

Perhaps the most interesting play – and surely the most spur-of-the-moment – was the Disco play run by the White House on Wednesday evening. After Chief Justice John Roberts misread the Presidential Oath of Office at the Inauguration on Tuesday, the White House decided that Mr. Obama should retake the oath “out of an abundance of caution.” In the realm of strategy, the play was a Disco , a play that resides in the Freeze subclass of The Playmaker’s Table, whereby a player sacrifices an element of his platform in order to preserve or advance its overall agenda or argument. The central tenet of a Disco is that forward progress cannot be achieved by the player unless or until the player first moves backward (i.e., one step back, two steps forward.) In this case, Mr. Obama’s counsel decided, “out of an abundance of caution,” that it would be best for the President to retake the oath—just to be safe. Strategically speaking, the administration conceded that there may have been a lingering doubt or two about Mr. Obama’s legitimacy (one step back), and that in order to silence any lingering doubts, he should retake the oath (two steps forward).

The Obama Administration will certainly be a sea of strategy. At any given point, you can rest assured that one of the 25 unique stratagems of The Playmaker’s Table will be in play. So we invite you to follow along with us, The Playmaker’s, to fill you in on the strategy game of the POTUS, here on the Plays of the Presidency blog.

Posted by: John Koval

Photo Credit: aceshowbiz.com