I have recently been thinking about a game I’ve not played for years, called Stratego®. It was fun to play in some ways, but bothered me in others because once you played, people would know your strategy. After the game had played out, people could inspect what you’d done, so it thwarted reuse, at least to some degree. Yet as I’ve seen more of how politics plays out, I have come to think this is how it is, and even to wonder if a better job of cataloguing their plays is in order.

It started innocently enough with Reagan, where people used to wonder if he was really behind all of the policies he had. Some speculated that he was just an actor performing someone else’s script. I was just starting to pay attention to politics, and I couldn’t say at the time. I like to think it wasn’t so. But it made me alert to the possibility that such things could happen, and that some degree of vigilance was in order.

Republicans, by the way, commonly accuse Democrats of similar things. I don’t think they’re right, but I’m just as vigilant for that, too. I like to think of a President as the person who's calling the shots. That way, when I want to get a change in policy, I know who to contact, whether they're a Democrat or a Republican.

I admit I’ve been nervous all along that Bush hasn’t been calling the shots. He seems to be serving up a lot of agendas fed to him by others, and I he frankly hasn’t impressed me that he’s bright enough to hold bad ideas at bay on the strength of his own intellect. If there were someone who wanted to control the nation from some undisclosed location somewhere, you might think it was better just to become VP than President. Note, too, the strength of such a configuration. Bush is almost impeachment-proof because impeaching us would lead to Cheney as President.

So the question arises: Could that be the strategy used for McCain? It seems at some level implausible. Is McCain another Bush? He shows himself every day to be less and less smart than I’d thought. But he’s still hard to control. And Palin? Well, she’s scary like Cheny, but again seemingly not as bright. So it doesn’t match up.

And yet, her remarks in the VP debate seemed unusually prepared on precisely this one point:

So it seems like she wants to become Cheney. Or her words say so. Michael Fox speculated on this in more detail his article News from VP Debate: The McCain-Palin Coup. And today Greg Randolph’s article Maybe It Really Is Palin/McCain Afterall speculates that the right way to explain the configuration is Palin/McCain.

Even more speculatively, perhaps they just see McCain as not likely to make it through office, so Palin is planned not as a Cheney replacement but as a Bush replacement—a puppet in waiting. That would beg the question who her eventual VP might be, of course. One would have to be nominated eventually, and it does require Congressional approval, but I bet the person appointed would not be who the Democrats would hope for. (I can already hear the phrase “up or down vote” echoing away annoyingly in my head.) But, for a time, there would be no one, a real opportunity for ambitious would-be puppetmasters to pull the strings from even more hidden places. Likely? Perhaps not.

It's hard to understand the strategies if one isn't sure what game is being played. It's said that, in poker, if you don't know who the fool is at the table, it's you.