LIFE'S A CAMPAIGN is a noisy, inside peek at people with power and what you can learn from them. This is a how-to book of ways to get people to do what you want them to. Much of life is persuasion. We persuade a girl or boy to love us, a child to play by the rules, a boss to appreciate us, a club to let us in. We must enlist allies, we must find friends, even in provision, just in case. Without seeking them, we face rivals. All the while we ask people to do things for us. We have dreams and must reach for them.The best politicians, as Chris Matthew has learned, are princes in this world. They are professionals at getting people to do things for them: vote for them, give them money, volunteer to work for them, root for them, trust them with life-or-death decisions. They're superb, as we all know, at cutting deals to their advantage, building and bolstering their reputations. They're particularly deft at facing rivals. They relish a good contest even when the stakes are their own careers. This success suggests a powerful skill set: knowing all the ways to get people to do what you want them to. Politicians engage people for a living. They live in a business that relies on being popular, being trusted again and again, being chosen as leaders by people again and again. Everything they possess comes from succeeding with people, getting along with them, getting ahead because of them. Chris Matthew has spent a lifetime watching politicians do this stuff and has learned much from them that is useful in politics and in life. When you can get people to do what you want them to do, you will succeed in most any quest. If that is your goal, you will find LIFE'S A CAMPAIGN a fun, lively, and thought-provoking discovery.
If you knock long enough and loud enough at the gate you are bound to wake up somebody. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
You cannot win if you're not at the table. You have to be where the action is. --Ben Stein
It was the third night of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. I was anchoring MSNBC, Hardball-style, from a vantage point on Herald Square, a few blocks from Madison Square Garden. The uptown traffic was honking past on the left, the downtown drivers squeezing through on my right. In front of Macy's, protesters were shouting their hatred of President Bush.
Just moments before, an angry Georgia Democrat, Senator Zell Miller, had taken the extraordinary step of addressing the GOP convention. He had delivered a contemptuous attack on his own party's presidential nominee, John Kerry, in which he accused the Massachusetts senator of being weak on national defense. According to Miller, the Democratic candidate would fight the war on terrorism with "spitballs." From my anchor desk on Broadway, I had Miller on a remote hookup from the convention floor. From the expression of the man looming on the giant TV screen before me, I could tell that here was a guy in no mood to answer tough questions.
"Get out of my face!" he told me threateningly. "If you're going to ask a question, step back and let me answer. I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a man to a duel."
Wow. Had I heard him right? How did I ever land such a job? How had someone like me, hooked on politics since I was a kid, found himself in the very crosshairs of American electoral warfare--to the point where some crazed U.S. senator was proposing a duel? On national television, no less?
Well, as the man said, just step back and let me answer. T
The fantasy explanation for how I began hosting Hardball five nights a week on MSNBC and The Chris Matthews Show on weekends is that someone heard what my dream job was and magically bestowed it upon me. The second--and better--answer is that more than a third of a century ago I managed to get in the game and then worked it from there.
When I came to Washington in 1971, after two years spent overseas, it was like arriving at a party where all the guests knew one another and no one knew me. The Senate and House offices of Capitol Hill were bustling and cozy--for those with jobs, that is. Everyone but me had a place to go in the morning, a snug workplace to leave at nightfall. I was on the outside looking in.
This is not to say I arrived in the nation's capital feeling uninvited. Ever since the great Kennedy-Nixon fight of 1960 I had felt the allure of politics. The battle over who should run the country was what I had thought about, talked about--and, yes, argued about--since I was in grade school.
My defining goal that sunny Washington winter of my return to America was to become a part of that political world to which I was so deeply drawn. While still a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, where I served from 1968 to the end of 1970, I had gotten a letter from a college friend telling me about his job as legislative assistant to a U.S. senator. The "LA," I knew, was the staffer who helped his boss with the big-picture stuff: writing speeches, drafting legislation, thinking. It was the post that the great speechwriter Theodore Sorensen had held in the young John F. Kennedy's Senate office. Transfixed, I had read Sorensen's book Kennedy a few months earlier on the overnight train from Mozambique to Rhodesia.
When I arrived in Washington, my strategy for turning myself into a Capitol Hill LA was...
Reviews
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In sharp contrast to his TV persona as the self-proclaimed "King of Interrupters," Chris Matthews presents his book in a well-modulated, almost chatty tone, enunciates clearly, and demonstrates an appropriate emotional range. Matthews's pleasant speaking voice has bit of an edge from his residual "Philly" twang, and although his pace is quick, it is not the rapid-fire staccato that often results in slurring in his on-air speech. The book is a delight for the political junkie. Matthews's insider's position offers a peek behind the curtain, through anecdotes and observations, at some of the most memorable players and events of the last 30 years. The author's performance of his own work only adds to the enjoyment. M.O.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
