If you are branded as passive, the table will roll right over you — your
opponents will steal antes without fear. Why? Because the addicted caller has
never exhibited what, in the wider world, is known as courage.

In poker, one must have courage: the courage to bet, to back one's
convictions, one's intuitions, one's understanding. There can be no victory
without courage. The successful player must be willing to wager on likelihoods.
Should he wait for absolutely risk-free certainty, he will win nothing,
regardless of the cards he is dealt.

For example, take a player who has never acted with initiative — he has
never raised, merely called. Now, at the end of the evening, he is dealt a royal
flush. The hand, per se, is unbeatable, but the passive player has never acted
aggressively; his current bet (on the sure thing) will signal to the other
players that his hand is unbeatable, and they will fold. His patient, passive
quest for certainty has won nothing.

The Democrats, similarly, in their quest for a strategy that would alienate
no voters, have given away the store, and they have given away the country.

Committed Democrats watched while Al Gore frittered away the sure-thing
election of 2000. They watched, passively, while the Bush administration
concocted a phony war; they, in the main, voted for the war knowing it was
purposeless, out of fear of being thought weak. They then ran a candidate who
refused to stand up to accusations of lack of patriotism.

The Republicans, like the perpetual raiser at the poker table, became
increasingly bold as the Democrats signaled their absolute reluctance to seize
the initiative. John Kerry lost the 2004 election combating an indictment of his
Vietnam War record. A decorated war hero muddled himself in merely "calling" the
attacks of a man with, curiously, a vanishing record of military attendance.
Even if the Democrats and Kerry had prevailed (that is, succeeded in nullifying
the Republicans arguably absurd accusations), they would have been back only
where they started before the accusations began.

Control of the initiative is control of the battle. In the alley, at the
poker table or in politics. One must raise. The American public chose Bush over
Kerry in 2004. How, the undecided electorate rightly wondered, could one believe
that Kerry would stand up for America when he could not stand up to Bush? A
possible response to the Swift boat veterans would have been: "I served. He
didn't. I didn't bring up the subject, but, if all George Bush has to show for
his time in the Guard is a scrap of paper with some doodling on it, I say the
man was a deserter."

This would have been a raise. Here the initiative has been seized, and the
opponent must now fume and bluster and scream unfair. In combat, in politics, in
poker, there is no certainty; there is only likelihood, and the likelihood is
that aggression will prevail.