Life's a Campaign Everything I've Learned from the Big Shots

Chapter 1 Whatever Gets You in the Game 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 warfareto 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 secondand betteranswer 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 cozyfor 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 aboutand, yes, argued aboutsince 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 primitive but direct. I would go door-to-door onMatthews, Chris is the author of 'Life's a Campaign Everything I've Learned from the Big Shots', published 2007 under ISBN 9781400065288 and ISBN 1400065283.