y. I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about the dreaded ‘R’ word – recession. And it’s so ironic that the president has just taken up his office. As I read this book the ‘game’ of politics seems to become less vague. This is not to say that I’ll soon be ready to enter the political arena, but I am being taught to recognize that there is more to politics than meets the eye, so to speak. I guess this book is really a contemporary version of ''The Prince'' by Niccolo Machiavelli. I found one of the most penetrating section of the book, in terms of playing hardball, to be Matthews’ analysis of how Reagan made himself seem what he was not. That is, how he had distanced himself from his office so that he would not seem responsible ''when disaster struck, when programs failed, when his appointees did embarrassing things.'' I am not very familiar with the world of politics and I found myself stuck sometimes with some of the terms he used in the book. One of the first of these terms was the "spin," which Matthews states as "defining the events in the most self-serving way possible." (p. 171) I understood this best with his description towards the end of how Clinton anointed himself ‘the comeback kid”. Matthews also explains a couple of political maneuvers were unfamiliar to me. "Lowballing" is the method of manipulating the public's expectation about an upcoming election result or poll with an articificially low estimate for possible future political gain. Matthews also explains the related technique of "sandbagging." He says, "One of the most effective means of diminishing your opponent's stature is to advertise his strengths, to set unreasonable expectations of his potential." (p. 201) Matthews sums up these latter two techniques thus: "In both lowballing and sandbagging, the principle is the same: create a handicapping system that makes any success of yours seem bigger than...
