Letters to the Editor
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What would it take for Clinton to concede?
In the game of chess, when the outcome of the endgame is perceived—often still with dozens of moves left to make—the player who recognizes his chances of winning to be very small usually concedes by toppling his queen. The outcome is never inexorable, since the losing player’s opponent can always make some devastating blunder. That is why the act of concession is an act of grace. Not only is it an acknowledgement of the superiority of the winner—and such a conclusion is very humiliating since, in chess, a loss is the result of being intellectually bested, without any extenuation whatsoever to salve one’s ego—but it’s also a sort of salute. The loser says “Not only did you play a better game up to this point, but you’ve earned enough of my respect that it would be unbecoming of me to bank on or hope for a stupid mistake on your part”.
Politics is not chess, of course. The outcome hardly depends solely on the intellect of the participants; instead, it’s also driven by the heated passions of outsiders, including those reporting on the game, those who have a stake in prolonging a spectacular competition. And, in this event, it’s not impossible that some irrelevant circumstance will arise to hurt one of the candidates; nor is it unheard of to lobby for a late-in-the-game change of rules, even though both candidates have agreed in advance to the game’s parameters.
However, even in politics, there comes a time when it’s particularly ungraceful (maybe even disgraceful) to hope one’s opponent stumbles. And even in politics, at some point, strong-arming for a change in the rules is recognized as a desperate and illegitimate tactic. Our enthusiasm for this Presidential race has already waned, and the game itself has been sullied. The responsibility for this lies squarely in the Clinton camp. It is she who, perfectly consonant with our collective lower instinct to win at any cost, embarked upon a “kitchen-sink strategy”. One can make a strong case that she has deliberately sought to divide the party along lines of race and gender. At any rate, she certainly has not attempted to discourage this devolution, and this exemplifies why she should never, ever represent the party, let alone lead the country. She views victory as the result of dividing, not of unifying people. She accepts the wisdom that politics is a dirty game, and without compunction, is willing to wallow in its mires.
We democrats are supposed to embrace progressive ideals. We ought not to be tethered to ideas that have been thoroughly discredited over the past eight years—among them, the notion that ends justify means. Or that the only thing that matters is whether you win or lose, how you play the game be damned. These are Bushian principles that have been used to rationalize the abnegation of our Civil Liberties, that justify torture of our enemies and have therefore made us unwitting torturers, and that have resulted in a complete loss of faith in the basic decency of our leaders. We really ought to attempt to restore the integrity of the game itself.