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The Capitol Hill Playbook
The Capitol Hill Playbook is a book of non-fiction book written for young people interested in a career in politics by Nicholas Balthazar and published by Skyhorse Publishing on May 1, 2013. In the Capitol Hill Playbook, Balthazar examines the factors that contribute to the success of people who work for elected officials, or who work in political institutions or organizations that revolve around politicians such as lobbying firms and advocacy organizations. To help the reader understand politicians and how to work with them, Balthazar explores the skills and qualities that all the most successful political staffers have possessed for centuries. The book weaves together Renaissance-era political philosophies with contemporary illustrations from the lives of famous political staffers such as Colin Powell, Cardinal Wolsey, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger and others. The Capitol Hill Playbook theorizes that for centuries, all successful people who have worked for politicians, for political institutions or for organizations that revolve around politicians have needed essentially the same spate of qualities and skills to be successful. To support this thesis, the author compares and contrasts the political philosophies of Niccolo Machiavelli, the author of The Prince and Baldassare Castiglione, the author of The Book of the Courtier and uses their philosophies to interpret and demonstrate the actions of famous political figures.

Nicholas Balthazar has worked in politics for almost two decades. He was an intern in the Clinton White House, worked for a state governor and for a member of Congress. To research the book, he studied the lives of famous political figures to determine whether it was possible to identify a group of skills and qualities that guaranteed success for a person working in the challenging world of politics. Each chapter explores and unpacks one of nine such qualities and skills for the purpose of identifying their underlying elements so that each can be taught to the reader in concrete and easy to understand terms.

The Capitol Hill Playbook explores two key questions: what sort of people run for public office and how to use this knowledge to successfully work for them. The book examines two model approaches to being a good staffer: the Machiavelli model, where the focus is on conducting oneself so as to adapt to the often unsavory realities of political life; and the Castiglione model, where the focus is on idealistic conduct designed for the way the world of politics would be if men always did the right thing. The book shows how success in politics requires that a staffer walk a path between these two methods.