“People who brief him say he is able to game out scenarios before the experts in the room, even on foreign policy, national security and other issues in which he had relatively little expertise before running for president. Obama is approaching the issues as a game of ‘three-dimensional chess,’ said John O. Brennan, an assistant to the President for homeland security and counterterrorism. ‘It’s not kinetic checkers....There are moves that are made on the chess board that really have implications, so the President is always looking at those dimensions of it.’”
— Carrie Johnson and Anne E. Kornblut in a front-page Washington Post story, August 28.