Bigger Deal

Expertise at poker used to be an unwritten job requirement for all would-be US Presidents. Proficient White House poker-players have ranged from Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and Warren Harding to FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, LBJ and Nixon.

We poker players can only be expected to approve. Were I a US citizen, the poker-playing candidate would always get my vote. As I noted in my 1990 book Big Deal, Truman played the game with the White House press corps while pondering whether to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan; Nixon financed his first political race on his wartime poker winnings in the Navy; Johnson used his poker know-how to forge early political alliances in Texas.

In recent years, however, this great American tradition seems to have fallen out of fashion: Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush Jr – not a cardsharp among them. Or is it just that America’s ‘new puritanism’ has all candidates of whatever party zipping their lips about their enthusiasm for anything remotely to do with gambling? This seems to be why the world is not yet aware of the poker skills of Senator Barack Obama, who now seems certain to be this autumn’s Democratic candidate against John McCain.

Asked by the Press Association to name a ‘hidden talent’, Obama revealed early in the campaign that he considers himself ‘a pretty good poker-player’. Subsequent investigations were hampered by a sudden shutdown on the subject from his anxious media minders. But it is already on the record that, after a cool reception from fellow legislators in 1997, when he first took his seat in the Illinois senate, Obama won over colleagues of all parties with his charm and expertise at the poker table.

With another freshman senator, Terry Link, Obama co-hosted a regular game for which there was soon a waiting-list including Republicans as well as fellow-Democrats. ‘When it turned out that I could sit down and have a beer and go out for a round of golf or get a poker game going,’ Obama told the Chicago Tribune, ‘I probably confounded some of their expectations.’

His was not a big game – on a bad night, a player could lose 200 bucks – but Obama has declined to discuss it as his hopes of the nomination have risen. ‘American Puritanism,’ says the Illinois-based, Obama-supporting writer James McManus, bestselling author of Positively Fifth Street and the forthcoming The Story of Poker, ‘has turned playing poker for tiny stakes into radioactive information.’

In a recent New Yorker piece, McManus suggested that poker was the secret of rookie Obama’s transformation among ‘the Chicago machine pols and downstate soybean farmers’ from ‘overeducated bleeding-heart and greenhorn’ to regular kinda guy. Said Link: ‘You hung up your guns at the door… It was just a boys’ night out – a release from our legislative responsibilities.’

From what I’m told by intimates, Obama’s poker skills bode well for a potential leader of the free world. He is versatile, but shuns unnecessary risks; he wants to be holding premium cards before he even thinks of getting involved; the only gambles he takes are very closely calculated.

America would be mad to pass up on a potential leader of such shrewd poker acumen. In a world so fraught with danger, a leader of such visionary powers will surely restore his country’s tarnished reputation around the world. So let’s hear it for one potential sign of Obamanian ‘change’: White House poker games played, like Harry Truman’s, with chips embossed with the presidential seal.

A version of this article first appeared in The Observer (of London) on 18 May 2008