Hardball: How Politics is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game by Christopher

Description: Hardball by Christopher Matthews Explains behind-the-scenes techniques used in politics; discusses alliances, enemies, deals, and reputations; and shares anecdotes about top politicians. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description How politics is played by one who knows the game...host of MSNBCs Hardball, Chris Matthews. Chris Matthews has spent a quarter century on the playing field of American politics--from right-hand man of Speaker of the House Tip ONeill to host of NBCs highest rated cable talk show Hardball. In this revised and updated edition of his political classic, he offers fascinating new stories of raw ambition, brutal rivalry, and exquisite seduction and reveals the inside rules that govern the game of power. Back Cover Chris Matthews has spent a quarter century on the playing field of American politics-from righthand man of Speaker of the House Tip ONeill to host of NBCs highest rated cable talk show Hardball. In this revised and updated edition of his political classic, he offers fascinating new stories of raw ambition, brutal rivalry, and exquisite seduction and reveals the inside rules that govern the game of power. Author Biography Chris Matthews is a distinguished Professor of American Politics and Media at Fulbright University Vietnam. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit; Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero; Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked; Kennedy & Nixon; and Hardball. For twenty years, he anchored Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC Table of Contents Contents Introduction Part I Alliances 1 Its Not Who You Know; Its Who You Get to Know 2 "All Politics Is Local" 3 Its Better to Receive Than to Give 4 "Dance with the One That Brung Ya" Part II Enemies 5 Keep Your Enemies in Front of You 6 Dont Get Mad; Dont Get Even; Get Ahead 7 Leave No Shot Unanswered Part III Deals 8 "Only Talk When It Improves the Silence" 9 Always Concede on Principle Part IV Reputations 10 Hang a Lantern on Your Problem 11 Spin! 12 "The Press Is the Enemy" 13 The Reputation of Power 14 Positioning Perspective Index Review "A thoroughly entertaining book about modern-day American politics and how its played. . . . Hardball is a must-read textbook that should be read with a marker."--The Wall Street Journal"Chris Matthews hits a political homer with Hardball. For political sagacity and humor, this ranks with the work of George Washington Plunkitt."--William Safire"Every so often a writer reads a book so incisive and so good that when he finally puts it down he says, Damn, I wish I had written this. I just finished Christopher Matthews Hardball. And damn, I wish I had written this."--Stephen Stark "The Washington Post""People will be quoting Hardball as long as the game of politics is played."--Hendrik Hertzberg "The New Yorker" Long Description How politics is played by one who knows the game...Chris Matthews has spent a quarter century on the playing field of American politics -- from righthand man of Speaker of the House Tip ONeill to host of NBCs highest rated cable talk showHardball.In this revised and updated edition of his political classic, he offers fascinating new stories of raw ambition, brutal rivalry, and exquisite seduction and reveals the inside rules that govern the game of power. Review Quote William SafireChris Matthews hits a political homer withHardball.For political sagacity and humor, this ranks with the work of George Washington Plunkitt. Excerpt from Book Introduction Be warned. This is not a civics book. It is not about pristine procedures, but about imperfect people. It is not an aerial judgment of how leaders of this or any country ought rightly to behave, but an insiders view of the sometimes outrageous way they actually do. Its subject is not the grand sweep of history, but the round-the-clock scramble for position, power and survival in the city of Washington. Let me define terms: hardball is clean, aggressive Machiavellian politics. It is the discipline of gaining and holding power, useful to any profession or undertaking, but practiced most openly and unashamedly in the world of public affairs. When the preceding words first appeared, I had no idea this book would become a classic, that many hard-nosed politicians would employ it as their bible, that CEOs would be caught carrying it in their briefcases, that young people set on bright careers would cherish their tattered copies as if they were treasure maps, that political science professors would assign it as required reading, that the word "hardball" itself would so penetrate the countrys vocabulary. More important to you, the reader, is how the basic rules of Hardball have proven true. The wisdom I gleaned from the gamesmanship of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, then witnessed first-hand from Ronald Reagan and rival Tip ONeill sparkles with even greater clarity today. Bill Clinton has given us frequent lessons in spin. South Africas Nelson Mandela has shown the advantage of getting ahead over getting even. Less fortunate leaders like Newt Gingrich have been taught to only talk when it improves the silence. As I wrote in 1988, this book is also meant to entertain. Lived to the hilt, a political career is a grand and exuberant experience. In the following pages you will enjoy some candid glimpses of how well-known figures achieved their ambitions. You will meet some very unlikely success stories, people who learned the game, played hard and won. Those who watch me on TV and read my newspaper column know my relish for this great lifes game. George F. Will called me "half Huck Finn and half Machiavelli." Indeed, I have learned as much from adventure as from observation. You only truly believe, lets agree, what you discover yourself. For me the grand journey began a quarter century ago when I came to Washington thinking I knew something about politics. I had been an addict of the electoral game, a true political junkie, since high school days. Even then I was rooting for and against candidates, cheering their victories, grieving with them on election night. When I went away to the Peace Corps in my early twenties, I maintained the romance from afar. With my late-arriving copy of The New York Times "Week in Review" and a few scattered magazines, I would strain to make my picks in the years congressional elections, even though the results reached my little town in Swaziland days after Americans had gone to the polls. So I should have been prepared for my immersion in the political world. For years I had stood in awed attention at the grand debate, the daunting personalities, the big-picture spectacle of national politics. But in terms of political hardball, I came to Washington as a neophyte. I entered a world that was as anthropologically exotic as the one I had just left in southern Africa. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the "very rich" are different from you and me. So, I came to learn, are the very political. arBehind those vaunted closed doors lies not only the paraphernalia of power but a distinctive language, which I myself have learned to speak. It is a world of tough old alliances, Gothic revenge and crafty deal-making, but also of marvelous state-of-the-art tactics such as spin and positioning. Old or new, the machinations of the hardened, dedicated pol would strike most people as offbeat. Indeed, by the laymans standard, there is little in this book that would be categorized strictly as on the level. In the following pages you will read of raw ambition, of brutal rivalry and exquisite seduction. If the tone is tongue-in-cheek, if some portraits and situations appear too comical for such important affairs, you have caught my attitude precisely: with all its nuclear-age centrality, politics is the only game for grown people to play. "Politics makes strange bedfellows," wrote the nineteenth-century humorist Charles Dudley Warner. That, we will see, is only the beginning of the strangeness. I have learned firsthand that the notions we harbor of political men -- and women -- are a poor guide to reality. Not even the cynic is prepared to understand the wheeling and dealing of the true pol: Expect a raging egotist, entranced by his own affairs, and you are seized with the unfamiliar pleasure of having someone probe with quick interest at your own most intimate longings, plotting your course even before you have done so yourself. Expect to be wooed with favors, and he captures you instead with a breathtaking request. His real knack, as Machiavelli taught him five hundred years ago, lies in getting you to do things for him. Eerily and against your will, you discover that the more you do for him, the more loyal you become, the more you want to invest in his career. Expect a figure of dark passions, fired by revenge, and you meet someone with cold-blooded shrewdness, an uncanny bent to bring the most hated enemy into the tent with him. Expect an argument, and you are blinded by the quick concession; yes, you are right on the larger "principle" -- it is the smaller, more tangible points that seem to interest him. Expect a swell, born to well-placed connections, and you meet someone heir to another sort of legacy: the inner drive to meet those he needs to meet. Expect a narcissist, and you meet a person who not only exposes his faults but has learned, adroitly, to brandish and exploit them. Such curious, even quirky behavior sets the political animal apart from the pack. And its what gives certain men and women decisive power over others. How many times have you heard a colleague complain that he failed to get a promotion because of "office politics"? Or someone say that she turned her back on an opportunity because she "couldnt hack all the favoritism"? What about the "backstabbing" and the "sharks" who haunt the corridors of business and professional power? But we all know people who have succeeded swiftly and magnificently while others plod along one yard and a cloud of dust at a time. The fact is, theres a great deal of politics in everyday life. For twenty-eight years I have worked in an environment where politics is the name of the game. As a U.S. Senate aide, presidential speechwriter and top assistant to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, I have seen men as different as Ronald Reagan and Thomas P. "Tip" ONeill play the game with gusto and win. I have gained something even more valuable than a healthy Rolodex of connections: the knowledge that success is only rarely based on the luck of looks, money or charisma. There is energy, of course. All great pols have that. But what drives this energy is the willingness to learn and do whatever is necessary to reach the top. The more they succeed at their trade, the zestier they become. John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were rivals for office, but they had one great love in common: the contest itself. Like others before me, I have been fascinated with the towering legends: Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln. I have heard the tales of how these great politicians learned to forge alliances, make deals, manipulate enemies and bolster their reputations, all the while building strong networks of alliances. Yes, there are rules to the game of power, part of the political lore passed from one generation of leaders to the next. This unwritten code accumulates year by year, like the morning-after cigar smoke in Capitol Hill cloakrooms. You hear it invoked behind the scenes, when someone does it right and pulls off a victory or does it all wrong and pays the price. One of the old-time guys, the fellows who have won for decades, offers the quiet verdict: "Just goes to show that..." Then comes the sacramental intonation of the rule itself, dredged from the archives of those whose lives depend on winning every time. I was standing one day in the Democratic cloakroom, that narrow hideaway just off the floor of the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol. The room is equipped with a snack bar, banks of telephone booths and two rows of worn leather couches with pillows so that members can take afternoon naps. It was lunchtime and the smell of steaming hot dogs filled the air. A small crowd of congressmen, escaping the Capitols chandeliered formality, were lined up munching sandwiches at the stainless-steel lunch counter. The talk, as always, was of politics. Quietly, I confided to one of the members that I was writing a book about the rules of politics, including all the tricks I had overheard in off-the-record hideaways like this. He looked at me, a crease of pain crossing his forehead, and said with dead seriousness, "Why do you want to go and give them away?" My answer is that such trade secrets are valuable not just to the aspiring pol. There are enduring human truths in the rules that politicians play by. In every field of endeavor there are people who could easily be successful but who spend their entire lives making one political mistake after another. They become so Details ISBN0684845598 Author Christopher Matthews Short Title HARDBALL REVISED AND UPDATED Pages 240 Language English ISBN-10 0684845598 ISBN-13 9780684845593 Media Book Format Paperback Year 1999 Imprint Pocket Books Subtitle How Politics is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Birth 1945 Residence US DOI 10.1604/9780684845593 AU Release Date 1999-11-02 NZ Release Date 1999-11-02 US Release Date 1999-11-02 UK Release Date 1999-11-02 Publisher Simon & Schuster Edition Description Revised and Updated ed. Publication Date 1999-11-02 DEWEY 324.70973 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:8333458;

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