Applying Sun Tzu to war of politics (#329, Topic P)

In an earlier post (#327), I mentioned that, in my view, "Politics is a zero-sum game at its purest. Its rules of engagement are cut-and-dry (vote count), its decision criterion is clear-cut (majority/plurality wins), and its result is cut-throat (winner takes all)." This quote is from the preface to my translation of Sun Tzu's Art of War (as The Art of Leadership by Sun Tzu); it was published in October 2000, a month or so before the November 2000 presidential election in USA. When I was doing entry #327, PBS's second installment of "The Supreme Court" was in the background. With this juxtaposition, I could not help recognizing the irony of what I was relating. For the 2000 presidential election, the voting results from Florida were crucial -- the candidate winning Florida would win the presidency. So, while it seems that counting votes cast by citizens in Florida would be doubly important at this critical juncture, what actually took place was the reverse. In the second installment of "The Supreme Court," the court actually took action to stop vote counting in Florida. On the criterion of "majority/plurality wins," given the peculiar provisions in the constitution (stating that the right to vote for the presidency vests with the electoral college), a candidate with the largest number of total votes cast by all citizens in all states and jurisdictions is not necessarily the president-elect -- this happened in two previous elections, and it happened again in 2000. My good friend, Anonymous, in commenting on entry #327, suggested a good way of leveling the playing field -- "forcing each Presidential candidate to run on US$5.0 million each." But, war -- and, by extension, politics -- is invariably an exercise in, using a word in vogue, asymmetry. (Only in war games, such as Xiangqi or the western chess, do the two teams begin playing with a level playing field.) I have read, on many occasions, that restricting spending money in political campaigns is a freedom-of-speech violation. Besides, what can $5 million do? We are talking billions!