Contract Bridge and the Democatic Primary

In the card game contract bridge, there is an old saying that guides players attempting to make contracts when the partner (and it's always the partner) has a few too many, and bids a seemingly unmakeable contract.

You have to play the game like the cards are where you want them.

In this way, a player might be able to make a contract (successfully scoring points in the game), though the hands dealt would not indicate likely contract-winning cards.

That's what Hillary is doing in the Democratic primary. She is adapting this occasional bridge imperative to her campaign.

She knows she cannot win on popular vote, pledged delegates, number of states won, and so on; so she plots a path to the nomination with the needed assumption that the political cards will be where she needs them to be.

But bridge is not a Rovian game.

In bridge, you don't change the rules in the middle, and though it's extremely competitive, bridge is a well-mannered game where you don't make up and say bad things about your opponents, and you never cheat.

These aspects of bridge elude Hillary in her campaign's pursuit of political power as it baits Obama by generating political impressions of Muslim, Black, stranger, unsteady, Ken Starr, creepy, inexperience, and so forth.

That's too bad, because what Hillary is doing, campaigning dirty and playing to bigotry, is destructive of the democratic game that Hillary apparently neither cares for nor understands.