The bare-bones new-release doldrums have left me so uninspired that all I can think of for this introduction is to note the alliterative anniversary of James Joyce's January 13, 1941 death.
Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime
by John Heilemann, Mark Halperin
File under "It Figures": "Many a tear has to fall but it's all in the game..." -- 1951 hit "Many a Tear Has to Fall" written from tune composed by U.S. Vice President (for Calvin Coolidge) Charles Gates Dawes.
To update an old adage, all I know is what I read on the internet — which is probably the same things you know about the everyone’s-talking-about-it Game Change. But if you want to compare notes, here’s what I know about the controversial book from John Heilemann, national political correspondent and columnist for New York magazine, and Mark Halperin, editor-at-large and senior political analyst for Time magazine.
Taking us inside the 2008 Barack Obama presidential campaign, and also incorporating the Clinton, McCain, and Palin runs, the expose — based on hundreds of interviews and partly motivated by 
the concerns that Bill Clinton's personal life might hinder Hillary's presidential prospects — delves into a scheme in the U.S. Senate to insinuate Obama into the race. In conjunction with this plan are the ripped-from-the-headlines contentions that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described then-Senator Barack Obama, referred to by staffers as “Black Jesus,” as "light skinned" and "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Reid has since apologized for the comment.
The book also alleges that Hillary Clinton wanted to make a bigger issue out of Barack Obama's extensive drug use, before being talked out of it. Speaking of big issues, presidential candidate John Edwards angrily spurned the advice of cooler heads in regard to his extramarital affair, according to Game Change, refusing to distance himself from filmmaker Rielle Hunter before his fling was flung before the public. Ah, love is not only blind…
Article comments
1 - Michael Sigman
FYI -- my dad, the late Carl Sigman, wrote the lyric -- and hence the words you quote -- for "It's All In The Game."
--Michael Sigman
2 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Yes. Quite a scattered composing process: the tune written in 1911 and your Brill Building father writing the lyrics, I believe, in 1951. I got my info from the songfacts"> website.