Iowa Turns Out Like Illuminati

If I'm going to be a regular blogger, I guess I have to write about politics every once in a while, right?

Watched a lot of the coverage of the Iowa caucuses last night. I didn't learn anything new about any of the candidates. The big surprise for me was the late surges by both Rick Santorum and Ron Paul to make it a three-way race moving on to the rest of the January primaries.

But why these two? A few months ago, when the Ames straw poll kicked things off, it was Michelle Bachmann who had the momentum as the "candidate who wasn't Mitt Romney." Then her light faded with the brief advent of the Donald Trump candidacy, and then the Rick Perry run, which looked like a rocket sled to stardom until he opened his mouth. And then it was Herman Cain's turn, and then it was Newt Gingrich's turn, and finally Santorum and Paul. There might have been other candidates to surge into the "not Mitt" slot, but the GOP started to run out of people, and more importantly, time. Like a game of musical chairs, whoever was riding the bubble when the music stopped and people had to actually cast a ballot, would take the prize.

And that brings me to Illuminati, the classic card game by Steve Jackson Games. There are several strategies to winning that have nothing to do with how you play the cards and manage your resources. It's all about laying low and appearing to not be a threat, all the while alarming the rest of your opponents over how close someone else is to winning. If you bubble too soon, the rest of the players will gang up on you to bring you down. If you bubble at the right time -- after several other bubbles have been shot down -- your opponents will be out of resources to stop you and you can step into the winner's circle.

If Bachmann's bubble had been the last to emerge, instead of the first, then maybe she'd be the one with all the momentum. Ditto for Perry, Cain, and even Gingrich. The lesson here, as in Illuminati, is simple: don't make your move too soon.