Yet he enthusiastically endorsed the minority's political playbook, incorporating its main ideas into his gubernatorial platform: cut taxes, reduce Medicaid spending, put welfare recipients to work, strengthen criminal penalties.

Business executives boasted that they had run their most effective vote-getting effort in recent years by taking a page from labor's political playbook, organizing grass-roots, home-district lobbying efforts as well as national and regional advertising.

But McCain also defied the political playbook by deprecating himself in a shrewd effort to pre-empt criticism and turn up the heat on his rivals.

And the economic development officials - who say they have made no studies of the economic impact of this activity - are, nonetheless, taking a page from this political playbook.

Wal-Mart is taking a page from the modern political playbook.

Such prohibited conduct is common in some political playbooks here.

The President's speech, while couched in the language of diplomacy, drew directly from his political playbook.

For a year now, Republicans have remarked happily about how the first-term Republican Governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have seemed to be running their administrations from the same political playbook.

To the Editor: You report that "Wal-Mart is taking a page from the modern political playbook" ("A New Weapon for Wal-Mart: A War Room," front page, Nov. 1).

In a larger sense, the Karpan campaign could have come straight from the political playbook of President Clinton, the 1996 grandmaster of co-opting the opposition's issues.