The final weeks of the presidential campaign were punctuated with comments about the “political chess game” and the electoral “endgame.”
Is it any wonder that the chessplaying candidate won?
Barack Obama said in his autobiography that he plays.
In fact, Lyndon Johnson was the only Democratic president since Grover Cleveland who didn’t know how the pieces move.
There’s no evidence that Mitt Romney plays. The last Republican president who was known to play was Dwight Eisenhower, who much preferred bridge.
Among serious players, there are some emerging stars in real politics today.
Zurab Azmaiparashvili, a top-class grandmaster, was just named first deputy minister of sport and youth in the nation of Georgia, according to Georgian news media.
Garry Kasparov’s role in Russian dissident politics is well detailed. But it is his longtime rival, Anatoly Karpov, who managed to get elected to something. He’s a deputy to the Russian parliament.
Fridrik Olafsson, a world-class rival of Bobby Fischer’s in the 1950s, was elected president of FIDE, the world chess federation, in 1978. After his defeat in 1982, he was named secretary to the Althing, the Icelandic Parliament.