My opening game is direct. His is a variation of some pawn thing that throws me immediately. I'd like to say I don't let my opponent see me sweat, but we are playing chess in his open garage on a 106-degree afternoon, and there is far more than a gentle glow on my forehead. I'm drenched. Stan Vaughan, candidate for state Assembly District 7 and master chess player, appears oddly dry.
He says something about Japanese military strategy in WWII. I get distracted by the 3-foot statue of Jack Daniels on a shelf above his head. He says something about the Book of Revelation, which refers to a conversation we've had earlier about the code of the Seven Seals, which he has cracked in his spare time.
Elsewhere, the world is hanging on what Sen. John Kerry is going to say tonight. In a few hours, the well-bred senator will take the stage in Boston, coifed and rehearsed, a nation before him, a hundred thousand red, white and blue balloons above him, history awaiting.
We'll tune in to any channel—all news networks will carry it—to see whether Kerry gets his delivery right, which tie his people chose for him to wear, and how, at the end, he kisses his wife and hugs his running mate. (He'll strive for lovingly but tastefully in the case of the former, sincerely but mannishly in the case of the latter.) The instant he has finished—delivered the speech, kissed the wife, hugged the running mate—crowds of reporters, pundits, bloggers, academicians and activists will begin squeezing and molding the amorphous blob of history, and this man's role in it will grow.
But that's four or five hours from now. And we're in a residential garage/campaign headquarters in North Las Vegas. And the candidate here is not running for president.
Stan Vaughan, a former chess pro, former postal worker, former Halliburton employee, is sinking a good share of another life into politics. Vaughan is an eccentric man with big eyeglasses and a rapid-fire speech pattern that offers little room to interrupt. He gives me a printout called "Stan's Stands," a synopsis of the issues that have drawn him into full-time campaigning: He wants ex-felons to have voting rights; he wants to expand anti-discrimination laws to prohibit employers from firing overweight people just because they're overweight; he wants to start a state lottery to help pay for education; he wants to end garage sale bans; he favors gun rights; he favors decriminalization of marijuana possession and, instead of building more prisons to house nonviolent offenders, he wants to put money into rehabilitation. He proposes secession as a last resort to stop Yucca Mountain; he supports a 6-percent cap on property tax increases; he says that if the state can try juveniles as adults at age 16, then the right to vote should be made available at at the age of 16 as well.
I ask him why, though, he'd want to go as far as holding office—trek to Reno, bear the tedium of state politics, not to mention the mud-slinging of campaigning—a lot of people wouldn't have it. And he replies—well, he doesn't reply right away. He stands up and takes me on a tour of the campaign headquarters.
It smells vaguely of cats. There's an old sofa parked in the back. A 4-foot, stenciled Vote for Stan Vaughan sign hangs on the wall. His campaign bike is parked in the corner: hot pink, with a red milk crate fastened to the rear to hold campaign materials.
There's a big box of some of the 200,000 hand-addressed campaign envelopes that await a trip to the post office, a table full of baseball cards ("a half-million dollars' worth") and boxes full of framed calligraphy and sketches he has done himself—he gives me three. One is an Emerson quote about success, another is a Hugo quote about love, the third, a George Sand quote about happiness. I initially decline to accept, but he insists. "I like to give people things."
Atop his work table are copies of the Anti-Federalist Papers, How to Win an Election, The Da Vinci Code and a bright orange Mead notebook on which he has written "Revelation." Behind me at the chess table is a stack of used Reeboks tagged for sale, 10 cents a pair.
When finally he answers the why question, it's this: "I'm the only independent candidate [running for state office] ... And 400 people asked me to run [via petition]."
Kerry's speech is released in print to reporters just prior to its delivery, as is typical in the cycle of big politics. He will hit every note: Iraq, the economy, tax relief for the middle class, health care, you name it. He will have delightful little double entendres: I'm reporting for duty. He'll say broad, promising things about his economic plans: "We will reward companies that create and keep good-paying jobs where they belong—in the good old USA."
Kerry is the son of a diplomat and an Ivy Leauge graduate and a member of the freakishly elite Skull and Bones fraternal organization.
Vaughan is the son of a Kentucky cattleman whose cattle got a disease and died. He was a bag boy at Winn-Dixie and a chess star at Clemson University before he dropped out and started managing a Howard Johnson's.
My chess opponent does not appear to be taking a victory for granted, although surely he is—he just doesn't appear to be. Appearances can be key in this game.
As they are in politics.
But where his chess demeanor is cool, the stories Vaughan tells of his past are more volatile. Once, he was beaten by a Henderson traffic cop. He pauses the chess clock and gets up to bring newspaper clips about the incident, which led to the end of a corrupt officer's career and the resignation of an attorney.
Later, he was in the middle of a brouhaha about the local chess club—he fetches some lawsuit papers for my perusal—before making his next move on the board: a pawn fork of my knight and queen. I cringe.
Recent news articles reported Vaughan chose Ralph Nader's running mate in Nevada without permission and began collecting ballot signatures. When Nader selected another running mate, Vaughan withdrew his support and allegedly offered those signatures for sale to the Democrats.
"Nobody sold any signatures," he says. "I never offered anything for sale ... I asked [the Nader Campaign] to reimburse me for expenditures I incurred going out there." And, he says, it is not unheard of for a presidential candidate to use names of "stand-in" running mates for petition-gathering in different states. Further, he says, Nader selected a Communist in Peter Camejo.
Vaughan shifts seamlessly from discussing the democratic process to discussing chess to discussing kabbalah to discussing pockets of oil in Northern Nevada to discussing his opponent Morse Arberry's 20 years in office to discussing the authors of the New Testament. At some point in our conversation—which consists of him talking and my head spinning—he leads me over to a corner of the garage to a box of signed celebrity photos.
"These are people that support my campaign," he says, flipping through photos of Ruth Buzzi, Greg Norman, Jim Carrey and Mary Stuart Masterson, among others.
He's toying with me now, I can see. This is a ruse. Right? Or does he really expect me to believe Jim Carrey endorsed his campaign? Well what if Jim Carrey did endorse his campaign? John Kerry certainly has a few celebrity sponsors. Wait a minute. Why would I even consider that? He's worn me down. Is this a sacrifice of some sort? A trick?
He tells me Stevie Ray Vaughan was his second cousin, and that talent runs in the Vaughan family, and that that movie with Mary Stuart Masterson is one of his favorites—what was it called? He stops talking and tries to recall it, unsuccessfully. I take a deep breath.
Stan Vaughan handily defeats me on the chess board—a rook-king mate on the A file. But he's nice enough to go back and tell me, move by move, where I made my mistakes. Apparently it was Q x a4 on the 19th move of a 47-move game that initially set me back.
He gives me a copy of his out-of-print book, The Everything Chess Book, signed by him. "Experience teaches you to recognize a mistake when you've made it again," he inscribes. "RSVP: Remember Stan Vaughan Please." I shake his hand and leave his campaign headquarters, inspired by the open field of politics, the breadth of the democratic process. Or, brain dead.
An hour or two later, Kerry kisses his wife and hugs his running mate and lets the balloons fall on his head. He also has a book, which is released in the days after accepting the Democratic nomination:
Our Plan for America: Stronger at Home, Respected in the World—a 252-page look at the Kerry-Edwards plan to "build a stronger, more secure America."
Kerry continues his roll, a momentous stride through current events in which everything he touches seems to take on the shine of history in the making. Even the campaign blog reports itself as a first: "For blog aficionados, one notable aspect of the Democratic convention was the first-ever credentialing of bloggers to cover the proceedings."
Later, Vaughan e-mails me to say that the most interesting thing about the Kerry speech, to him, was that the nominee wants to end dependence on foreign oil.
Vaughan's e-mail: "Nevada oil?"
Later still, he e-mails about that movie he had referred to, the one that he couldn't remember: "The name of that movie with Johnny Depp and Mary Stuart Masterson was Benny and Joon."
In the end, it's clear that Vaughan is a much better chess player than I am. But we knew that going into this game. Still, I'm glad I played. It's not common that a player of his caliber and a player of my caliber would ever be seen on one board. But it's a testament to the game of chess that we can both play. And that we each would want to.
All politics is local.