BY GARY ANDRES

I first encountered the word Zugzwang in a 1985 New York Times Magazine column by the late William Safire.  It’s a chess term that means “compelled to move, but imperiled by doing so.” The word’s political implications are profound.

For the past 25 years, I’ve regularly witnessed the repercussions of that hard-to-pronounce term.  During the 1990s, my friend Arne Christenson (who served as chief of staff to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich) and I would lament some thorny political problem faced by Republicans or Democrats and how being “compelled to move” would cause unavoidable collateral political damage.  Arne would just shake his head and say, “Zugzwang.”  We both knew exactly what he meant.
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