I'm a pretty decent chess player. I can usually beat anyone I can get to play me, but my weakness has always been my endgame. I can always get my pieces set up with a strong arrangement and attack from protected positions, but when it gets down to arranging a quick and decisive kill, I often falter, and when I do, it ends in a war of attrition, as I gradually take out all of the other player's pieces, and finally get their one remaining piece, the king, cornered.

I guess it's that quest for a good endgame that has made me so aware of this ability in others, and how glaringly present this problem is today in both Iraq and the presidential primary campaigns.

In the congressional testimony yesterday and today, just like last year, and the year before that, it's obvious that Bush and Co. have no decisive endgame strategy. Maybe it's because they really have no intention of giving up control over Iraq's huge and untapped oil reserves, but even in regard to maintaining control, they could have approached the whole occupation of Iraq from such as stronger postion if they would have had any kind of planning in place from the beginning. And now we are stuck in a slow and brutal war of attrition with no end in sight.

The Obama vs. Clinton battle seems to be stuck in the same situation. Clinton, the heavy favorite going into this, based her whole strategy on a fast and decisive win on Super Tuesday, and blew it. Regardless of all of the other issues that could be indentified as weaknesses in her campaign, the false stories, the campaign shake-ups, the financial missmanagement, it was her complete lack of any kind of contingency plan for after Super Tuesday that will be seen as her greatest, fatal error. Her chances now depend soley on a bloody war of attrition, hoping to pick away at Superdelegates, hoping to kneecap Obama on any issue where she can find a toehold, hoping to rewrite and sneak around the rules in some way as to advantage her slim opportunity. In my experience, hoping that someone comes along and kicks the chessboard off the table, is not much of an endgame strategy. In the end, for Hillary to win, she might have to resort to kicking it off the table herself.

Obama, too, seems to be suffering from the lack of having a decisive endgame strategy. He did engineer one of the biggest come-from-behind series of primary victories that any of us have ever seen, and seems to almost have this thing wrapped up, but is still enmeshed in the above-mentioned war of attrition that Hillary is subjecting him to. With Pennsylvania favoring her, and North Carolina favoring him, the battle will continue on into an unforseeable future.

Eventually though, and within a few months, the primary and then the general election will be over. At least we have hard and fast dates for these events. It is most unfortunate that in Iraq, there is no end in sight.

In all of these enterprises, though, it appears that no one has a decent endgame.